✦ Inklink
A cozy word-association logic puzzle.
Every clue links two words — find the one place where it truly belongs.
The idea
Inklink turns the table-talk of association games like Entre-linhas / Between the Lines into a solo deduction puzzle.
Each panel on the board sits between a row word and a column word. Your job is to drop every clue piece into the panel where it fits both:
🩺 Doctor + 🐻 Bear → 🐾 Veterinarian
Easy — until a 🦛 Hippo column shows up and the veterinarian suddenly has two homes. Then the other pieces, and the numbers on the words, have to tell you which one is right. Early chapters are gentle association; later ones become proper Sudoku / Einstein's riddle style logic where you test a hypothesis and watch it break.
Highlights
| |
|---|
| 🧩 Tactile play | Drag & drop or tap-to-place, with pieces that fly, pop and swap into place |
| 🧠 Real deduction | Every level is machine-verified to have exactly one solution reachable by logic — no guessing |
| 💡 Hints that teach | Hints explain the reasoning ("if Footprints went here, Meteor would have nowhere to go…") instead of revealing answers |
| ✏️ Pencil marks | Note candidate pieces in panels, Sudoku-style |
| 📖 Storybook look | Paper textures, hand-drawn panels, light & dark themes, fully responsive |
| 🗂️ Data-driven levels | Levels are plain JSON, ready to also feed a printable puzzle-book edition |
Screenshots
How to play
- Each panel sits between the word of its row and the word of its column.
- Place every piece where it fits both words. A panel holds at most one piece.
- Some pieces seem to fit in several places — use the other pieces to rule options out.
- A number on a word tells how many pieces its row or column receives.
- Check tells how many pieces are right (not which ones).
The current levels are written in Brazilian Portuguese; the engine is language-agnostic.
Under the hood
The game is split into a pure logic core and thin front-ends, so the same levels can power the web game, a printable book or a future engine port.
src/
core/ pure TypeScript, no DOM
puzzle.ts level validation & bitmask indexing
solver.ts exhaustive search (solution counting / uniqueness)
deduce.ts human-style solver: named techniques → difficulty rating & hints
explain.ts natural-language explanation of each deduction
analyze.ts level analysis + solution explorer for authoring
game/ session state, undo, persistence, hint selection
levels/ *.json levels (ordered by file name)
ui/ vanilla DOM + CSS (FLIP animations, pointer-based drag, synth SFX)
scripts/ authoring & tooling CLIs
tests/ Vitest suite — every shipped level is proven unique and solvable
A design finding from the solver
Building the solver surfaced a neat constraint of the core mechanic:
- A full board (one piece per panel) always collapses to "this piece only fits here" steps — it can never require hypotheses.
- Empty panels without extra info make a level ambiguous whenever a piece could slide into an empty panel.
- Row/column counts are what create non-local deduction, and with it the "suppose… contradiction!" moments.
The deduction engine rates each level by the hardest technique it needs:
| Rating | Techniques |
|---|
| Easy | naked singles, full lines |
| Medium | hidden singles, lines that need exactly the remaining pieces |
| Hard | hypothesis → contradiction |
Development
npm install
npm run dev # play locally
npm test # validate every level + engine tests
npm run levels # difficulty report (add -- --steps for the walkthrough)
npm run levels:explore -- src/levels/06-museu.json # find unique solutions for a draft level
npm run media # regenerate README screenshots & GIF (uses local Edge)
npm run deploy # build and publish to GitHub Pages
Level format
{
"id": "farm",
"title": "The Farm",
"counts": "cols", // none | rows | cols | both
"rows": [{ "id": "cow", "label": "Cow", "icon": "🐄" }],
"cols": [{ "id": "breakfast", "label": "Breakfast", "icon": "☕" }],
"clues": [
// every panel where the clue is *plausible*, as "rowId+colId"
{ "id": "milk", "label": "Milk", "icon": "🥛", "candidates": ["cow+breakfast", "cow+market"] }
],
"solution": { "milk": "cow+breakfast" }
}
icon accepts an emoji or an image path under public/ (e.g. assets/milk.svg).
Authoring flow: write words and generous candidates → run levels:explore to get the solutions and count modes that make the level unique (hardest first) → paste counts + solution → npm test.
Roadmap
Credits
Designed and developed by Bruno Ribeiro. Inspired by the association board game Entre-linhas.
