About TiSch & Quasi Puzzle

Who makes this

TiSch is an independent, one-person studio. There is no team page because there is no team — just an owner with a product vision, a battered original puzzle for reference, and a stubborn belief that small, well-made games are worth building carefully. Everything on this site, from the game itself to these pages, is made in-house. If you want to talk to us, the contact page reaches a human directly.

Why this game exists

The original puzzle is a genuine physical object: thirteen circular pieces, each rimmed with a personal pattern of bumps and notches, that pack flat into an octagonal frame in a startling number of correct ways. Where it comes from is honestly unclear — we have found no verified manufacturer, patent, or catalogue entry, and our history page says so plainly rather than inventing a romantic backstory. What is clear is that puzzles like this tend to vanish: they get produced in small runs, given as gifts, and quietly lost.

We built the digital version so this one wouldn't vanish. Not a "reimagining" — a faithful recreation, piece for piece and bump for bump, that anyone can play free in a browser, with a few additions a physical set can't offer: hints, a picture mode, colour skins, a gallery that remembers every distinct solution you find, and an optional leaderboard.

How it's built

The short version: obsessively. Every outline in the game — all thirteen pieces and the board itself — is exact circle geometry; when we audited the shapes, every single outline point sat precisely on a circular arc, because the puzzle's beauty is its mathematics and we refused to approximate it. The game's rules were verified three independent ways, including a full computer search that counted every possible solution — the number is larger than you'd guess, and the full account is in Counting the Solutions. And because software rots when nobody is watching, the game sits on a battery of automated regression tests: any future change must reproduce today's behaviour exactly, or it doesn't ship.

Two more principles guide the build. The game runs entirely in your browser with no account and no sign-up; what little the game remembers, it remembers on your own device, as our privacy policy spells out. And the whole game is one self-contained file — an old-fashioned idea we're fond of, because it keeps the game fast, portable, and honest.

What's next

The same engine that runs Quasi Puzzle is being extended into a family of games. First in line is a collection for very small children — friendly animal figures assembled from a few large, chunky pieces on wooden-toy-style boards, deliberately designed so that a two-year-old cannot fail: no timers, no wrong answers, no ads, nothing to buy by accident. We've written about the thinking behind it in What Shape Puzzles Give Small Children. If you'd like to hear when it launches, an email to tisch_games@proton.me with the word "animals" is all it takes.