Playing every puzzle from the keyboard

Keys that work on every page

Tab and Shift + Tab move through everything interactive in reading order. Whatever holds focus is outlined, and the outline is deliberately obvious rather than tasteful — a focus ring you cannot find is not a focus ring.

Enter or Space activates a button or link. Escape closes the mobile menu, dismisses a result overlay, and cancels a note or selection inside a puzzle.

Every page begins with a skip link, reachable with a single Tab from the top, that jumps past the navigation to the content. On a puzzle page it lands on the board.

The grid puzzles

Sudoku

Arrows move the selection. 1 to 9 enters a digit, 0, Backspace or Delete clears one. N toggles note mode, so digits go in as pencil marks instead; entering a digit that is already marked removes it. Ctrl + Z undoes, and the history covers the whole grid. Given digits refuse input rather than silently ignoring it.

Minesweeper

Arrows move the cursor. Enter or Space opens a cell, F flags or unflags it. Pressing Enter on an already-open number whose flags satisfy it opens all its remaining neighbours — the keyboard equivalent of a chord, and the fastest way to clear a large board.

Pixel Logic

Arrows move. Space cycles the cell through filled, blank and empty. X marks blank directly, which is quicker when you are crossing off a long stretch. Holding Shift while moving paints as you go.

Lights Out

Arrows move, Space or Enter presses. R deals a new board at the current size.

Word Search

This is the one that wants a pointer. Arrows move the cursor and Enter sets the first letter, then arrows extend the selection along a line and Enter confirms it. It works, and dragging is genuinely easier. Escape abandons a part-made selection.

The other five

Crate Push

Arrows walk, and walking into a crate pushes it. Ctrl + Z undoes one move and can be held to rewind a long way; R restarts the level. Undo is unlimited and covers the entire level, which matters in a puzzle where one wrong push is fatal.

Sliding Puzzle

Arrows slide the tile from that direction into the gap — pressing Up moves the tile below the gap upwards. This is worth trying even with a mouse to hand, because it is considerably faster than clicking tiles.

Tower of Hanoi

1, 2 and 3 pick up from a rod and drop onto a rod: press the source, then the destination. Illegal drops are refused and the disc stays in hand. Escape puts it back.

Memory Match

Arrows move, Enter or Space turns a card. The pause before a non-matching pair turns back is fixed rather than being tied to the mouse leaving the card, so keyboard play is not disadvantaged.

Connect Four

1 to 7 drop a disc into that column, or arrows to move the indicator and Enter to drop. Ctrl + Z takes back a move, including the computer's reply.

Screen readers and announcements

Every board is a labelled region, and each cell carries a description of its position and state — “row 4, column 7, empty”, or “row 2, column 3, flagged”. Reading a grid this way is slow, and it is at least possible.

Changes that are not where you are looking get announced through a polite live region: the mine counter, the move count, a completed row, a win or a loss. Politeness matters here — an assertive region would interrupt a screen reader mid-cell on every move.

Buttons say what they do rather than what they look like. Icon-only controls carry text labels, and toggles report their state instead of merely appearing pressed.

The honest caveat: we have tested with a screen reader, not with people who rely on one. Spatial puzzles are inherently difficult to convey linearly and we would rather hear about the gaps than pretend there are none. The contact page exists for that, and accessibility reports go to the front of the queue.

Motion, colour and text size

Motion. If your system asks for reduced motion, the site honours it: the drifting particles stop, the parallax stops, reveal animations become plain appearances, and card flips become instant swaps. Nothing decorative moves. Puzzle feedback still happens, because you need to know your press registered — it simply happens without travel.

Colour. No puzzle uses colour as its only signal. Minesweeper numbers are numbers, flags have a shape, Connect Four discs differ in fill as well as hue, and matched Memory cards get a mark rather than only a tint. Body text sits above the WCAG AA contrast threshold against its background; the smallest metadata labels sit close to it, and are never the only place information appears.

Text size. Everything is sized in relative units, so raising your browser's font size enlarges the interface rather than breaking it. Boards scale with their container and stay square. Zooming to two hundred per cent leaves every page usable.

If part of a page never arrives. The puzzles need everything to turn up — they are the puzzles. Every guide, though, and every word on every other page, reads perfectly even when something is missing. Text is visible from the start and the animations are added on top of it, so a piece that fails to load leaves a plain readable page rather than a blank one.

Phones and small screens

Boards are laid out for the screen rather than shrunk to fit it. On a phone the sidebar becomes a section below the board, controls move within reach of a thumb, and the board takes the width available.

Every tap target is at least the recommended forty-four pixels on a side, including Sudoku cells on the smallest board. Where that could not be achieved by scaling alone, the puzzle offers a smaller grid instead of shrinking the cells past usability.

Two puzzles need a long-press: flagging in Minesweeper and marking blanks in Pixel Logic. Both also have an on-screen mode switch, because long-press is easy to trigger by accident and impossible to discover.