Islands of Insight is a recent puzzle game taking place in a shared online world. This, by itself, is an extremely ambitious concept, because normally “puzzle” and “MMO” do not go together.  I know only of two other games that tried to be puzzle MMOs: Uru, a 2003 game in the Myst franchise that dropped the MMO aspect before commercial release; and Puzzle Pirates, another game from 2003 which is a “puzzle game” in the sense of Tetris.

There are three challenges facing a puzzle MMO: Puzzle games generally have small cult followings at best, whereas an MMO requires some level of mass appeal to be commercially successful. Puzzles are often solitary activities, whereas MMOs are social. Puzzles generally require careful bespoke design, whereas MMOs want endless content.

Did Islands of Insight succeed in squaring the circle, to create the Puzzle MMO? No, not at all. Despite the shared world, it’s not a very social game, and would work equally well solo. And while players seem to like it, it wasn’t commercially successful enough to support its development team.

But the game successfully addressed at least one of the challenges of the puzzle MMO.  They created over 10,000 puzzles with high quality standards to populate a large 3D world. These include perspective puzzles, mazes, hidden objects, moving block puzzles, and many more. I’d like to focus on the most numerous type of puzzle, the logic grid.

In a logic grid, you’re supposed to color each square black or white, while following a number of rules listed on the side. There are a dozen different rules to find, and they appear in all sorts of combinations. This flexible framework permits a huge number of distinct puzzles, and I’d wager they’re relatively quick to design.

To me, the logic grids were immediately recognizable. The designers didn’t invent the idea from scratch, they built upon a pre-existing genre. So let me explain how Islands of Insight makes a noble effort to introduce logic puzzles to a broader audience.

Adapting an old genre

Logic puzzles are a genre of puzzles where you deduce how to fill out a grid while following a set of rules. Most people are familiar with at least a couple popular varieties of logic grid puzzles: specifically Sudoku and Picross (aka Nonograms). However, there are many more varieties of logic puzzles, which you may find listed on the website of Nikoli, a magazine that popularized the genre.

For example, one type of puzzle is called Nurikabe. In Nurikabe, you must color each square white or black. The white squares are “islands”, and the black squares are the “sea”. The sea must be fully connected, but cannot have any 2×2 squares in it. Each island must have exactly one number in it (all numbers are provided as clues at the beginning), and that number must equal the number of squares in the island.

If you looked carefully at the logic puzzle at the top of the post, you may notice that its rules closely resemble Nurikabe. It’s actually missing one rule (each island must have exactly one number in it), but otherwise, it’s identical. Elsewhere in the game, you may find high-difficulty puzzles that are just straight up Nurikabe.

Nurikabe isn’t the only logic puzzle that Islands of Insight borrows from. Here are some other rules, and where they come from:

Area Numbers – taken from Nurikabe
Letters – adapted from Numberlink
Darts – taken from Yajilin
Lotuses and Galaxies – adapted from Galaxies
Viewpoint numbers – taken from two different puzzles, Kuromasu and Bag.

Islands of Insight isn’t just copying other logic puzzles.  In order to simplify, the game restricts players just to coloring squares black or white. It won’t let you fill in numbers, or draw lines, or boundaries.  Nonetheless, by combining different rules, and mixing in a few rules that I haven’t seen anywhere else, it’s a very expressive framework.  It permits a few classic types of logic puzzles, while allowing for many wholly new types of logic puzzles.

Invisible Tutorials

Now, if you’re like most readers, you mentally skipped over the paragraph where I explained the rules of Nurikabe. You’re forgiven! It’s a lot of rules to keep in your head. You can imagine that this could be a barrier to entry for people wanting to try logic puzzles.

This is something that Islands of Insight really nails. Because puzzles can have any combination of rules, you start with puzzles that have just one or two rules. You familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of each rule. Then when you finally encounter a Nurikabe puzzle (or any other puzzle with a complicated set of rules), it may be challenging to solve, but you’ve at least got each of the individual rules down by then.

Based on observing other people play Islands of Insight, I think there is another barrier to solving logic puzzles. Some people will just quickly color all the squares, and then just try to fiddle with the colors until all the rules are satisfied. Imagine trying to solve a Sudoku by just entering in a digit into each square, and then adjusting digits until all the rules are satisfied. Hey, if it works, then it works, but it’s not going to work for the harder puzzles. People who solve puzzles this way will eventually hit a ceiling, and won’t understand how to get any better.

Islands of Insight has a particularly clever way to address this. One of the possible rules is “underclued grid”. That means that the puzzle has multiple solutions. Your task is to color everything that is true in all solutions, while leaving every other square uncolored. So the player can’t just guess the solution, they must make a series of deductions instead. Some underclued puzzles are relatively simple, breaking logic puzzles down into individual steps so that players can learn to use them; other underclued puzzles are quite interesting and challenging in their own right.

So not only does the game have a massive number of high quality logical puzzles within a single flexible framework, it also teaches players how to get good at solving logic puzzles. Although the game is not a commercial success, it deserves praise for what it is.

Other places to find logic puzzles

If you liked the logic grids in Islands of Insight, here’s where you can find more.

Nikoli – The original popularizer of the genre. You can buy a subscription and solve puzzles online.
Puzzle Picnic – A website where people can create, exchange, and solve puzzles for free. (ETA:
Grandmaster Puzzles – A blog with lots of challenging logic puzzles.
Cracking the Cryptic – A popular YouTube channel that shows an expert solving puzzles, mostly Sudoku mutants.
Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection – A multiplatform puzzle app. Note that these are not hand-made, but procedurally generated.
US Puzzle Championship – An annual online competition, which you can try unofficially from anywhere in the world.