Bejeweled
Swap two gems, line up three, watch them vanish and the rest cascade down. PopCap's match-three puzzle turned a simple web game into one of the most-copied ideas in casual gaming.
#Puzzle
9 items
Brain Age
The game that put a Nintendo DS in your mom's hands. You held the DS like a book, scribbled math answers with the stylus, and a floating polygonal professor told you your brain was 47 years old — so you came back tomorrow, and so did every parent and grandparent in America.
Minesweeper
The grid of gray squares you clicked to uncover numbers — and the flags you planted over the mines you hoped weren't there. Bundled with Windows for years, it was equal parts logic puzzle and nerve test.
Mini Veritech
A self-checking tile puzzle: twelve numbered tiles in a clear plastic case, each with a fragment of a geometric pattern on the back. You worked through a workbook puzzle, placed each numbered tile on its answer, then flipped the case closed — if the pattern matched what was printed in the book, every answer was right. The game told you before the teacher could.
Myst
An island with no instructions, no timer, no way to die — just a series of machines to solve, each more surreal than the last. Myst proved a computer game could be a slow, atmospheric mystery with no combat and endless patience.
Portal
A portal gun, a passive-aggressive AI, and a promise of cake. Portal shipped in 2007 as the little extra in Valve's Orange Box — built by fewer than ten people — and walked away with the whole bundle's spotlight, a Game of the Year trophy, and half the internet's vocabulary.
Treasure Cove!
An underwater educational adventure game where kids explored a cove, collected gems and treasures, and solved reading and science puzzles. A sibling title to Treasure Mountain! from The Learning Company's edutainment catalog, released in 1992.
Treasure Mountain!
An educational adventure game where kids climbed a mountain solving reading, math, and logic puzzles to catch the Master of Mischief's elves and collect treasure. A classroom-and-home edutainment staple of the early 1990s, published by The Learning Company for DOS, Windows, and Mac.
Word Search Puzzle Sheets
The themed word-search worksheet the teacher photocopied for Friday afternoons and holiday parties — a grid of letters hiding a list of words, hunted down with a highlighter. Fall leaves, Halloween, Thanksgiving: there was a seasonal one for everything.