Logic Games and Puzzles

Every game here is free, runs in your browser, and needs no download and no sign-up: open a page, pick a difficulty, play. They work on a phone as comfortably as on a desktop, so a game fits into a bus ride as easily as an evening. And most of them are here for a reason beyond fun — Go Magic teaches Go, and each of these shares something with it: capture, territory, counting, or the art of cutting off an escape.

What Is on This Page

• Go — the game the whole site is about, against a bot on 9×9, 13×13 or 19×19.
• Chess and Checkers — the classics, each against a bot you can dial down to beginner or up until it hurts.
• Reversi — flip your opponent’s stones by trapping them between yours, on an 8×8 board of Go stones.
• Gomoku, Four in a Row and Tic-Tac-Toe — line-up games, five, four and three in a row, quick to learn and unexpectedly sharp.
• Sudoku, GoLines and Catch the Cat — puzzles for one: sudoku in stones on a goban, falling Go shapes, and a hex chase you win by cutting every route out.

Against the Computer or a Friend

Every two-player game here has a bot with levels — ten in chess, checkers and gomoku, six in reversi, four in Four in a Row and three in tic-tac-toe — from opponents that blunder the way beginners do to ones that punish every slip. Each also has a two-player mode for a friend on the same phone or computer, the way you would share a board on a table. The puzzles are for one, with levels to unlock and scores to beat.

Where to Start

Five spare minutes: Catch the Cat, or a few rounds of tic-tac-toe. Twenty minutes: four in a row or reversi. An evening: chess, checkers — or Go itself. For a child, the classic path runs from tic-tac-toe to four in a row to Atari Go, where the first capture wins.

Why Logic Games?

Because they are the cheapest way to train what is hard to train directly: reading a few moves ahead, recognizing a pattern you have met before, holding a plan while the position changes. A short game a day does more for that than any amount of reading. And if one of them leaves you wanting the deepest version of the same skills, that is what Go is for — start with the rules, or with Atari Go, the capture game that teaches them in a minute.