The question
Are there puzzle games with no ads and nothing to buy?
Fewer than you would hope, and the free ones are usually free for a reason. Here is what the alternatives actually cost.
Why this is awkward
Puzzle games are the most thoroughly monetised category on the App Store, and the reason is that they are played in short bursts many times a day. That is a lot of gaps to put an advert into, and the standard shapes are all built around the gap: a full-screen interstitial between puzzles, a hint you unlock by watching thirty seconds of something, and a lives meter that refills on a timer or immediately for a pound.
None of that is incompetence. A sudoku app with no adverts and no purchases has no way to pay for itself, so almost nobody ships one — and the ones that do tend to charge up front, which is a perfectly honest answer that people rarely pick.
The result is that "free sudoku" reliably means "sudoku with an advert between every puzzle", and the alternatives are worth going through properly.
Doing it yourself
The genuine free answer is the web. Most classic puzzles play fine in Safari, plenty of long-running puzzle sites are far lighter on advertising than their app equivalents, and Safari's own content blockers apply — which is more control than you get inside an app. Add to Home Screen puts any of them behind an icon that looks like an app.
The other free answer is paper, and it is not a joke: a printed sudoku costs nothing, needs no battery, and is genuinely nicer to do. Puzzle generators will produce a printable page at any difficulty.
And the honest paid answer is that a few subscriptions bundle puzzles you may already be paying for — a newspaper subscription usually includes its puzzle app, which is worth checking before installing anything.
What that costs you
- A web page needs a connection. On the Underground, on a plane, or anywhere with no signal, it is a blank screen — which is precisely when most people reach for a puzzle.
- Nothing is remembered properly. A half-finished grid survives until you close the tab or Safari reclaims it, and nothing follows you to another device.
- The input is wrong. Entering pencil marks in a web grid on a phone is fiddly in a way a native keypad is not, and there are no haptics to tell you a move landed.
- Most free puzzle sites are also advertising-funded, so this often trades a full-screen advert for a page full of banners rather than removing them.
- Paper does not tell you whether you were right, and does not keep a record of anything.
Or the app that does it
Plain and Simple Games is fifteen of them in one app — sudoku with difficulties that mean something, Klondike solitaire, a five-by-five crossword a day, mahjong, minesweeper, nonogram, 2048, word search and the rest.
There is no advert between hands, no hint to unlock, no lives to wait for, and nothing to buy at any point. A scorecard behind all fifteen keeps streaks, best and average times, and a calendar of the days you played.
Your games are stored on your device, and in your own private iCloud database if that device is signed in to iCloud — which reaches your other Apple devices and nowhere else. Signing in with Apple is optional and asks Apple for no name and no email. There is no advertising, no analytics, no third-party code of any kind, and no network requests of the app's own.