Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Wirespan, a daily power grid optimization puzzle I made for my son
This was a lot of fun to build! I have an autistic son who is extremely interested in power lines, electrical transmission towers, and how the grid works. I decided to build a little game for him. When I finally showed it to him with bated breath, he rolled his eyes and said, “Is it 3D? I’ll only like it if it’s 3D!” So, I decided to polish it up and release it to the world! You get a 9x9 map with one power plant, three houses, and terrain obstacles, and the goal is to connect the power plant to the houses with an optimal path. Beneath the coat of paint, it’s a graph theory optimization…
Wirespan is a daily puzzle game where players route power from a plant to houses on a 9x9 grid using the least wire possible. The game combines graph theory optimization with the challenge of balancing square-based… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So…
2022 · hexapipes.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 2IM
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything. There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this: - For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes)…
2024 · rahulilango.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Still very much a work in progress, but really wanted to share this even in it's early state. Had heaps of fun building it to learn more about WebRTC.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Swapple - A daily puzzle game where you transform patterns by swapping rows and columns. Challenge yourself to solve it in as few moves as possible!
2025 · swapple.fuglede.dk · its alternatives →
- 6
This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7IW
I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the…
2024 · hidden-mirrors.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Hey, maker here. After launching a daily word search game, I randomly thought of this math game while driving. Finally got around to making it and I think it turned out pretty cool. It’s a math search game that’s meant to help you practice your quick addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills. I’m hoping it’ll help people (even those like me who aren’t big on math) learn and increase their speeds. (There are also some settings you can enable to make the game harder) If you try it out, please let me know if you found it fun, if you have anything you’d like me to add, or if you…
2024 · worchle.com · its alternatives →
- 9
An educational puzzle game. Solve a series of tasks where you build increasingly powerful components. Starts with the simplest logical components and ends up with a programmable computer.
2018 · nandgame.com · its alternatives →
- 10
"Lights Out" is a mathematical puzzle that lives on an grid where each cell of the grid is one of two colors: either red or white. The goal is to eventually get all the cells in the grid to be red. What's the catch? Clicking a cell will not only flip its color, but also that of all cells sharing the same row or column as it. To me, this game feels like playing with a Rubik's cube --- every time you think you are fixing one cell, you mess up its neighbors! There are many ways to arrive at a solution... some mathematical (linear algebra, or combinatorics), others more logical,... and yet…
2025 · raymondtana.github.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Ecocoru is a puzzle game where you have to solve compass and ruler construction problems. The game mimics compass and ruler and let you draw straight lines/segments and circles/arcs. You can also view and explore a solution for each problem. A basic knowledge of well-known results of Euclidean geometry is needed to play the game. The game has over 70 problems.The game is designed for full-screen mode and the use of the mouse.
2022 · sdkgames.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi HN, I am co-founder of Kickstage, a software company specializing in solutions for the electrical industry and lately grid operators. We are hiring engineers from different backgrounds, a lot of them software developers with limited experience in the sectors. Deep domain knowledge is key in our industry however, so we are constantly teaching the basics of power flow analysis, active vs reactive power, transmission line properties etc. With Jupyter notebooks and the Python console only, that's a tedious task and hardly ever led to a deep understanding of the topics. So we built BambooGrid:…
Jul 2026 · bamboo.kickstage.com · its alternatives →
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- 14
Building a 1D-Pong game is a bit of a rite of passage at the Chaos Communication Congress. I was inspired by a version I saw at 38C3 and built my own interpretation for 39C3. Lots of people enjoyed playing it and even Elliot Williams featured it in his 39C3 Hackaday Podcast. And I can attest: it's truly fun because it's sooo simple at first sight - but wait until the speed increases... Not a bad work to fun created ratio for such a little project. I used the opportunity to play around with Claude Code on my preexisting codebase to publish a nice-ish repo on GitHub. It worked great without…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Brain challenging puzzle game for true erudits
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 16GA
Hi everyone! Graphs is the intersection of data visualization and the daily web puzzle genre (Wordle, NYT Mini Crossword, Connections, etc.). Every day, you are given a nameless graph and 5 options to select the right dataset it is representing. Upon winning, you can access the underlying dataset and other info + maintain a streak and stats. It's super simple - check out today's chart and you should be able to get the gist quickly. My email + twitter account (@graphsgame) is on the page, would love a feedback or a follow. Don't hesitate to reach out!
2024 · graphs.world · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi everyone, I built FuseCells, a minimalistic logic puzzle game where every level is handcrafted (no procedural generation). It started as a personal challenge to design a clean rule-set and scale it to thousands of puzzles without losing difficulty balance. What’s unique: • 2,500 handcrafted levels across multiple grid sizes • Deterministic logic — no guessing required • A rule system inspired by constraint-solving and path-finding concepts • Daily challenges and global progress tracking • Fully built as a solo dev project Technical notes for those curious: • Level generation tools I wrote…
Dec 2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 18
The latest macOS offers the world’s best way to play — and add to — your collection of music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and more.
2014 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Solve today’s 5x5 Sumplete grid in under 5 minutes. Delete numbers until each row and column hits its target sum. Track streaks, compare stats — play free on any device.
2023 · sumplete.com · its alternatives →
- 20
An interactive game for kids how to wire electronic boards
2025 · its alternatives →
- 21TC
Hello, I wanted to share with you all a interactive map of the economics and physics constraints of the AI buildout. It has macro drivers, industrial chokepoints, and where that shows up in markets. I've added 393 nodes and 562 edges to capture other supply / physics constraints as well. There's no sign up, and no pay wall, it's all free. Please let me know what you think!
Jun 2026 · atomprophet.io · its alternatives →
- 22IT
I added Co-op online to Lazy Blocks. Using PeerJS & WebRTC, so no server. Hope you enjoy, let me know if you have and feedback, etc. Thank you, Adam -- EDIT Oh! -- Click the "Globe" icon to start online play -- Edit 2 Oh! -- I should mention - the board is infinite, you can scroll and pan and zoom in all directions -- and you can always find the other player with one click
2025 · lazyblocks.xyz · its alternatives →
- 23
For a decade, I’ve wanted to build a simple game that shows why the Traveling Salesman Problem is fun to work on. Something I could pull up at a party when someone asks “so what does your company actually do?” Something my kids could play and understand why dad stares at vehicle ro
Dec 2025 · graphhopper.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Play Gridl, a free daily block puzzle. Drag pieces onto an 8x8 grid, clear rows and columns, and share your score. Same puzzle for everyone, one attempt per day.
Feb 2026 · gridlgame.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid alternatives
- I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries alternatives
- I made a digital circuit drawing and simulation game alternatives
- I built a multiplayer Gameboy alternatives
- Swapple, a little daily puzzle on linear reversible circuit synthesis alternatives
- I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →