Quasi Puzzle™

Quasi Puzzle is a faithful digital recreation of a classic circle-packing puzzle: thirteen circular pieces, each rimmed with its own pattern of rounded bumps, that pack flat into an octagonal frame. There is no picture to complete and no single answer to find — the same thirteen pieces assemble correctly in exactly 14,376 distinct ways, a number we didn't guess but counted, three independent ways. The full story of that computation is in Counting the Solutions.

How it plays

Drag pieces from the tray onto the board; they snap to position when they fit. Tap a piece or press R to rotate it, F to flip it. Every bump must find a gap and every gap must be filled — place all thirteen legally and the packing completes itself, automatically. Stuck pieces, hints, a picture mode that turns any photo into the puzzle's face, colour skins, and a gallery that fingerprints every distinct solution you discover are all built in. The full guide covers everything, including the optional leaderboard.

The mathematics inside

Behind the friendly rounded shapes sits genuine geometry: a triangular lattice of touching circles, curved-triangle gaps where three circles meet, and a tidy piece of arithmetic — forty bumps for exactly forty gaps — that guarantees a finished board is always a perfect packing. Our mathematics page unpacks the circle-packing theory, and the puzzle's murky origins get an honest treatment (no invented legends) on the history page.

For families

The engine behind this game is growing a gentler sibling: Animal Friends, a collection of twelve chunky animal puzzles for ages two to five, built on wooden-toy-style boards where wrong placements are not just discouraged but impossible — and with a hard no-ads, no-data rule for anything aimed at children. We've written about the design philosophy in What Shape Puzzles Give Small Children, and the whole project in About TiSch.