Puzzles.dmg, as of 2026-10-05

People who spend a lot of time on computers occasionally find themselves at loose ends. If you prefer to fill that free time with puzzles, Simon Tatham (better known as the author of PuTTY) has collected a bunch of them into a bundle. Various maintainers have ported the collection to systems beyond Windows and Linux, including Android and iOS, but the macOS version is currently 3 years out of date, since no one with a running Mac is available to compile them.

I recently bought a new MacBook and was dismayed to find this state of affairs when I went to reinstall Puzzles on it. I decided to try out the (very well-documented) compiling instructions in the README, which required getting acquainted with Cmake and a document formatting system called halibut. Once I installed those, however, building the package was straightforward. I even figured out how to wrap it into a DMG for installation, and tested it out on my old MacBook before sending it off for recycling. I've sent the results to the author in case he wants to add them to his page, but in the meantime I thought I might post them here.