For the last month I’ve been completely addicted to the logic puzzle game Tametsi. Put briefly, it’s ordinary Minesweeper but with a set of 160 hand-crafted puzzles rather than a randomly generated starting board. Beyond the Minesweeper rules that we’re all familiar with, there are only a couple of additions: non-square/irregular grids for many of the puzzles, and “global” constraints, such as a fixed number of mines in cells of a particular colour or along a specified line.

I finally finished all the available puzzles and so Tametsi has released its grip on me. I’ve been trying to figure out what made it so compelling, and here’s the best I could come up with.