Play Free Puzzle Games
For the puzzler's amongst you here is where we keep our puzzle games. Play free games for fun, collect trophies or puzzle away in our tournaments for cash jackpots. Feel free to suggest any new online puzzle games you think should be on BrainDash.com. The more addictive and infuriating the better!
Puzzle History
Testing your wits isn't a just new pastime brought about by Rubik's Cube, crosswords, and playing games like sudoku online; people all over the world have been using puzzles to play games and challenge their mind throughout history. Even in old Egypt, as early as 3500 BC, the Egyptians used a game called Senet to challenge the wits of their opponents, using a grid to play a puzzle-like board game that used puzzle strategies similar to chess or checkers. People love solving puzzles. John Spilsbury wanted to create a unique way to teach geography, he created a map on a board and cut out the countries, allowing students to try to re-place the countries onto the map. Students found this was more like a game than a lesson, and the popularity of the teaching method began to spread because it was both fun and educational. Eventually, the addiction to fitting pieces together grew so large that people wanted to play even when they weren't learning, and the modern jigsaw puzzle was born, which still entertains many people across the world today. In more recent puzzle history, a sculptor and professor named Ernő Rubik created a "magic cube" that enticed players to twist the edges around a central pivot point on the shape to try to match colours on each of the sides. Despite having a solution that was based on complex mathematical algorithms and permutations, people of all ages and types were picking up their own Rubik's Cube for a chance at being the first of their friends to find a solution. Now the game is so popular that people around the world compete to solve the cube in the fastest time, and new types of cubes with more squares on the grid have appeared for players wanting a stronger challenge. People have always enjoyed solving crosswords in the newspaper or catching the Rubik's Cube wave, so it's only natural that, in modern times, the coming of the computer would bring more fun ways to enjoy puzzle games. After Steve Russell created "Spacewar!," one of the first games to be played on a computer, the idea of using computers for playing games really caught on. In 1984, a man named Alexey Pajitnov designed a computer puzzle game with his friends at work involving lining up colored blocks to gain points. When the game was discovered by computer game companies, everyone wanted to publish the addictive puzzle game. Pajitnov named the game Tetris and it became an instant hit as soon as it was spread across the world. After the success of Tetris, players were left wanting more and more puzzle games to play on their computer and video game consoles. New games started to crop up left and right, and with the birth of the internet, people have found new ways to enjoy online puzzle games both alone and together. Websites like BrainDash.com allow players to not only play puzzle and trivia games, but to play together in a puzzle community and even compete for cash and prizes. The world of puzzle games is constantly evolving as people look for new ways to test their brains and solve puzzles with friends. Even today's games are puzzle history in the making!
Puzzle Variations
The Internet boasts a plethora of puzzles of nearly every type imaginable. There are so many different puzzle game variations that to try and name them all would be one of the hardest puzzles of all! Whether your interest is word puzzles, number puzzles, picture puzzles, or some other variation entirely, you're sure to find a puzzle to quell your appetite among the hundreds of different types of puzzle games. Word puzzles are an extremely popular online puzzle variation. If word puzzles suit your fancy, why not try a written logic puzzle? Well-worded logic puzzles are not only fun to solve; they also stimulate brain activity helping you breeze through the rest of your day with a little mental pick-me-up. If you're a synonym scholar, a crossword puzzle may be right up your alley! What may appear to be a simple game of trivia can stump even the most knowledgeable word puzzle connoisseur with a tricky question or unbelievable answer. Word searches and word jumbles turn letters into a puzzler's treasure at every turn. Anagrams and cryptograms turn words into clever quips and curious codes for the serious word puzzler to decipher. If number puzzles are more your speed, have no fear! There are several puzzle games variations that will have you dancing in digits for days. One online puzzle variation of the number variety that has been gaining popularity in recent years is the Sudoku puzzle. Though variations of the Sudoku puzzle date back to late 19th century France, it has only been within the last 10 years that the addictive number puzzle has been gaining popularity in Britain. In fact, the day after The Times published its first Sudoku puzzle ever, a reader wrote in to grumble that he had missed his tube stop due to the absorbing number puzzle! With Sudoku's popularity on the rise, several websites and computer programs have been published to solve the puzzles online. Why not try here at BrainDash.com. If Sudoku has grown too easy for you, try your hand at Kakuro, Sudoku's more challenging cousin. Kakuro is an puzzle game variation best described as a combination of a crossword puzzle and a Sudoku puzzle. Kakuro puzzlers solve the grid by filling in numbers both across and down to obtain accurate "cross-sums". Many word puzzles, such as word searches and crossword puzzles have numeric counterparts for the math whiz puzzler who abhors English. Picture puzzles let the spatial relations expert truly shine. Whether solving a difficult geometry or trigonometry puzzle, or just rearranging a group of matchsticks into a word using the lowest amount of movements possible, picture puzzles are an puzzle game variation that are sure to provide you with hours of puzzling entertainment. Many picture puzzles are simply optical illusions that everyone will interpret differently. Though not one of the hardest puzzle types, optical illusion puzzles can be among the most fun to analyze. Whatever kind of puzzle leaves your brain begging for more, rest assured that there is an online puzzle variation that will satisfy all of your puzzling predicaments!
