Gamebox

About Gamebox

Gamebox began as a fan recreation of The Economist's daily Inboxes, a Shikaku on an 8 by 12 grid, and grew into a hub of newspaper-style logic puzzles. Shikaku asks you to split the grid into rectangles that each hold one number equal to their area. Battleships is solitaire Bimaru: find a hidden fleet on a 10 by 10 grid from the ship counts on each row and column, with no two ships touching. Train Tracks lays one unbranching line between two stubs on the border using row and column counts, and Kakuro fills runs of cells with digits 1 to 9 that add up to the clue at their start.

Each game's daily challenge takes its seed and difficulty from the UTC date, so every player gets the same board, and earlier days can be revisited. Every puzzle is generated and then checked to have a single solution. Leaving a daily only pauses it, and the hub's stats page adds up your totals, time spent and a streak across all the games.

Play needs no account, though signing in with Google or GitHub carries progress across devices. It suits players who want several classic logic puzzles a day in one quiet place, and anyone who liked Inboxes and wants more of it.

How to play Gamebox

1. Open Gamebox and pick a game from the hub.
2. Choose the daily challenge to play the board everyone gets today.
3. Shikaku: drag rectangles so each holds one number equal to its area; Battleships: place the fleet to match the row and column counts.
4. Train Tracks: draw one track between the border stubs to match the counts; Kakuro: fill each run with distinct digits that add up to its clue.
5. Come back after midnight UTC to keep your daily streak.

Tips

• In Battleships, mark water around every ship you place; ships never touch, even diagonally.
• In Kakuro, learn the forced sums: two cells adding to 3 can only be 1 and 2.
• In Train Tracks, a row or column count of 0 rules out a whole line at once.

Questions