Guides and rules

Snake was born in a 1976 arcade cabinet, reached a billion people on Nokia phones in 1997, and was reinvented as a multiplayer arena in 2016. The story of the game, and what changed when the walls came down.

Racetrack is the pencil-and-paper racing game popularised by Martin Gardner in 1973: you steer a car on graph paper using vectors, and inertia decides how sharply you can turn. Here are the rules, the vector maths, and how Dotrace adapts them.

Why the corner strategy works at 2048, how to order a row so merges cascade, the one move that breaks a winning board, and how far you can go past 2048. Written for players who keep stalling around 512.

The rules of blackball, the English pub version of 8-ball: two shots carried after a foul, free ball, and losing on the black. Includes a side-by-side comparison with American 8-ball, which uses ball in hand and called pockets instead.

How swipe-to-spell word games are built, why the crossword grid matters more than the letter wheel, what makes a good letter set, and the tactics that get you unstuck on a hard board.

Les règles complètes de la belote coinchée : enchères de 80 à 250, ordre et valeur des cartes à l'atout, obligation de fournir et de couper, coinche, belote-rebelote et décompte des 162 points. Avec un exemple chiffré.

The two families of pipe puzzle — rotation and sliding — why the sliding kind is far harder, and how to plan a route backwards from the exit. With the parity idea that explains why some boards resist.

How sliding block puzzles work, why they are hard for computers as well as people, and what changes when every block has its own coloured exit. Includes how to read a jammed board.

What polyominoes are, how many exist at each size, why fitting them into a shape is genuinely hard, and the parity trick that tells you a puzzle is impossible before you waste time on it.