Thank you.. As fun as it was to solve the simple puzzle, nothing will replace the joy I felt when I showed it to my 8 year old daughter to see her solve it in 2 minutes flat with no instruction at all. Thank you for making it possible. I had to ask her to persist for a bit as she didn't exactly see what had to be done. She knew what had to be done once she accidentally swiped and saw to rabbit get dragged along. May be an animation showing what is possible will help here.

I’m 45 years old and have been staring at it for a very long time without a clue. First off, you’ve raised a wonderful 8 year old and deserve congratulations.

Second, is she available for lessons?? :)

36 y/o, same here

34 year old, probably took me 8 minutes

34yo and also around 8 minutes.

Though, sheepishly, I wouldn't have even mustered the energy had I not seen that someone's kid solved it in two minutes.

Took me about a minute, but I have the mental age of 10, so moving rabbits and a kangaroo (dog?) around makes sense. I just read the boxes/looked at the pictures and moved things around, until the solution was obvious. Just quickly moving things quickly.

If I'd had to think about it without interaction... I'd probably never get it.

I do a lot of graphical work, and have to make things fit / function and the only way to do that is hack it, and then clean it up so it looks planned.

My 9 year old got it in about 3 minutes, but only after I told him to slow down and read everything on the page.

He started with furious swiping right off the bat. I started by reading everything and thinking through moves in my head without even trying to swipe.

I think we ended up solving it in about the same amount of time. Interesting that the rapid iteration method and the measured thoughtful method yielded similar results.

I'm surprised you could infer what was possible just by looking at it. For me, the hints at how the rules worked weren't sufficient. I think lighting up the signs if the conditions are met and perhaps having something on the free move edges to make it clear they can be moved on freely would be super helpful.

I effectively solved the question of "wtf is this?" and the puzzle at the same time.

But after that I really wanted to play again!

I thought it was an image at first, and was trying to mentally move the pieces on the board. After the state got too complicated I happened to tap on one of the pieces and realized it was interactive.

I've played kinda similar things before, such as Baba is You.

Yeah I'd love to see more of these. Now I wanna make one myself.

She's a genius[1]. Took me an age to figure out what the rules were and then a fair while to actually get it done.

[1]Well compared to me anyway

I inferred rules that turned out not to be true:

1) I thought that, obviously, rabbits and dogs couldn't occupy the same space, lest the dog attack the rabbit, causing a lose-condition

2) I assumed that only one animal could occupy a node.

The game, until the last move, is winnable with those extra rules.

I didn't necessarily think of those as rules, but I nevertheless solved the puzzle (until the end) without contradicting them. I only noticed maybe halfway to the solution that there is only one carrot, so obviously the rabbits have to pile up to solve it.

Rabbit and dog never need to occupy the same space.

But yes, I never thought about rule 2 until I got the dog and one rabbit in place and hadn't won.

> I thought that, obviously, rabbits and dogs couldn't occupy the same space

farmer, fox, chicken, and grain, and only three of them can fit in the rowboat

foxes eat chickens and chickens eat grain would be a nice type of constraint OP could add to the puzzles

Seems to me a good comparison between inductive and deductive reasoning. - with a simple logic puzzle like this, both are fairly comparable - especially when some adults (me included) start with the wrong assumption, like two can't be in one node, which will slow down the process

Actually, that's how children learn best: by breaking shit^W^Wperturbing the environment and observing changes.

This instance of the puzzle is also easy enough to actually solve this way. Wouldn't work nearly as well with 25 nodes, 5 rabbits and 3 dogs...

Haha. Thanks for saying that internet stranger! Compared to me as well. It took me quite a bit longer to solve it too, even after i figured the rules.. so I guess kids are just good at adapting to the pretend-laws-world-problem-solving..

Availability bias, keep in mind for kids her age cartoon animals and games like this are their full time job.

My 5yo also enjoyed the puzzle and was excited when he finally figure it out.

The one issue he had was whenever he'd try to move a rabbit from boat to house, he'd accidentally trigger the browser back function because he was starting too close to the edge of the screen. Then the puzzle would be reset when he navigated back to the page.

This caused a lot of frustration because he could be careful when he was thinking about it, but then he'd get absorbed in the puzzle and forget to swipe carefully.

> May be an animation showing what is possible will help here.

Now I'm imagining a version where the animals get antsy and start hopping around on their own if you take too long to make a move.

Your daughter is awesome.

Another quick reward effect you could do to avoid flashing colors is to make the animals jump up and down, as if they’re happy to get their food

I liked the insanely rapidly flashing colors.

I know, I like them too!

This was a popular thing to do in ye olde commodore 64 days, because you could cycle the background color easily in basic, and nobody thought yet that a video game could trigger epilepsy

(honestly, I'm a bit skeptical about this theory even today, but will defer to the typical opinion on this matter, not being an epilepsy expert)

That’s real. I once wrote a quick & dirty bookmarklet to disable all GIF animation on a page because even fairly unremarkable-to-most-of-us GIFs are uncomfortable for an epileptic friend. It is still on https://alanhogan.com/bookmarklets

Really shouldn't be too difficult to do this at the OS level or even hardware level if someone really wanted to make this happen.

I don't think it's that dangerous if the flashing is very rapid, it has to hit some sweet brainwave spot (10x/s ?) I think. The Porygon episode did.

Atari games, too. This reminded me of the end of Missile Command and Adventure.

Rapidly flashing colors may be dangerous for people with epilepsy.

I wonder if it's better for people with epilepsy to have a simple and more robust solution by getting a monitor that has low refresh rate or limited colors than to try to police all the internet and applications from ever showing flashing colors.

They may and if I had epilepsy then I'd look to do the same, but that won't absolve us of the need to take care so that people without special equipment don't need to worry.

Turn your monitor's refresh rate so low that flashing lights won't actually be flashy and try to operate your mouse cursor. Good luck.

A touch device may be a better option in that case.

i don't have epilepsy but those colors going that fast were a bit much for me

Nice puzzle: Was able to complete it after some trial & error.

Suggestions:

- Mark uncrossable paths with (an 'X' in the middle of the line) OR (red) to make it clearer that the path cannot be currently crossed.

- Mark paths with fulfilled conditions (as green OR with the 'X' removed)

- Mark fulfilled conditions with (a tick symbol OR green) and unmet flags with (a cross ('X') OR red) to make the fulfillment state of conditions obvious.

(edits because I can't use emojis in HN comments.)

All these suggestions are great and "make sense". And all of them would dramatically simplify the game and remove the challenge. The puzzle IS the trial and error.

Perfect illustration of how hard game design is.

I would prefer if that was not "auto" marked in that way, it felt nicer to try to think about each crossing. Perhaps something that could be turned on and off.

No need to improve on any of the suggestions here, pal. Just continue your monthly 1st/15th releases. What is really valuable is the unparalleled creativity in it, not the senseless polishing to cater to the swarming audience.

Fun! Though I managed to break the game by placing all on the boat :)

Break? That's just a failure condition as per rules, working as intended

Just needs a reset button then. Having to refresh the page is a bit silly.

I am adding a reset button (but it only shows up once you reach a dead end, in order to avoid clutter)

Agreed, along with a message of some kind explaining what's happened. My kid ended up with all the animals on the boat and unable to move any of them off, and didn't know why. This was before she understood all the rules of the puzzle.

Just FYI, the page doesn’t work on iPad/iOS 14.x Safari, no animals to be seen, just the static graph.

Works on my iPad Air 2 on iOS 15.6.1 and Chrome.

Works fine on an iPhone

That was fun but I didn't see any reward effect at all.

I didn't see one either until I turned off my dark mode browser extension. If you also use an extension that modifies stylesheets, you might want to try disabling it for this site.

Did you get both rabbits to the carrot?

Yes, I did. No reward condition. I am using a dark mode browser extension though.

I thought there was no solution because I thought the arrow pointing on the line from the flower meant you could only go that direction from the flower, but the solution relies on someone behind able to move backwards from the flower.

Granted there is the blue feedback if you are on the flower, but it’s confusing when you are trying to plan ahead.

edit: Fun puzzle though!

Funnily enough I understood all the rules, but still was mentally blocked for a while because I just didn't even consider moving back from the flower as a possibility. I guess there was something about that arrow that was very enticing.

Oh. I solved it by following the arrows, didn’t know I could go the other way.

I followed the arrows too. Took me 15 mins or so to solve. I think the former comment meant that he thought that once you are on a node that is in front of an arrow, you have to follow that arrow, but that is not its meaning obviously.

It didn't work for me on my computer, but I grasped the concept well enough to see that it would be quite enjoyable. Since the purpose of the MVP is to get people interested, I call it a success.

Where you inspired by Alcuin numbers[0]?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCVAGb1ee8A

I don’t have epilepsy, even though, that’s quite an intense flashing image.

That multiple pieces can occupy any space is information you need to present to the player.

There is a tiny bug, when you release and click fast you can drop anywhere.

Thanks for your wonderful books. You have been an inspiration.

That was fun. GG!

thank you!