Plain and Simple Games
Nine quiet games. No ads, and nothing to buy.
Nothing here
no account · no server · no one in between
Nothing here
no account · no server · no one in between
Who this is for
For anyone who wants a quiet game — a sudoku on the sofa, a hand of solitaire, one word a day — and is tired of an advert between every puzzle and a shop selling hints. It needs nothing but an iPhone or iPad, and it costs nothing.
Nine games share the shelf, and you are not expected to want all of them. Any you don't play can be switched off in Settings, which takes the card off the home screen without touching a single stat.
It will not suit you if what you want is a game to compete in. There are no leaderboards, no achievements, no friends list, and no daily challenge against strangers. Not features waiting to be built — they are absent on purpose, because none of them is what this is for.
How to set it up
- 01Download it from the App Store and open it. There is nothing to buy, no account to create, and nothing to download after the app itself — every puzzle is made on your own device.
- 02Pick a game off the shelf: Sudoku, Klondike solitaire, Five in Six the word game, a daily crossword, Five Dice, Colour Sort, Parking Lot, Nonogram, or Connect. All nine play immediately, with no signal needed.
- 03Optionally, sign in with Apple. It does exactly one thing: lets your stats and half-finished boards follow you to your iPad. Every game and every feature works signed out, and everything is saved on the device either way.
- 04Change what doesn't suit you in Settings — the clock, mistake highlighting, automatic pencil marks, draw-three solitaire, hard mode in the word game, and vibration are all switches.
What it does
Sudoku, generated on your device in four difficulties that mean something. Most free sudoku apps decide “hard” by counting how many numbers they hand you at the start, which is close to meaningless; this one solves each puzzle the way a person would, technique by technique, and labels it by how much work that actually took. When you are stuck, the hint explains the next step in plain English — “in the top-left box, 7 can only go in one square” — and only fills the square in if you ask a second time.
Five in Six: guess a five-letter word in six tries. Everyone gets the same word each day, worked out from the date on your own device rather than fetched from a server, so it works with no signal at all. The tiles use shape as well as colour, which means the board reads correctly if you can't tell green from yellow — there is no colour-blind mode to go and find, because there is nothing to switch on. Unlimited practice rounds when one word a day isn't enough.
Klondike solitaire, draw one or draw three, with unlimited undo, a tap that sends a card home if it can go, and an honest “no moves left” that appears only when the deal genuinely is out.
A five-by-five crossword, one a day, the same one for everyone. The clues are written by hand rather than generated, because the clues are what makes a crossword good — a hundred of them ship inside the app.
Five Dice: five dice, three throws a round, thirteen boxes to fill. At the end of a round the throw has to go somewhere, including a nought into a box you were saving when nothing has gone your way. That is the game, which is why there is no undo.
Colour Sort: pour the colours between tubes until each holds one. A hundred and twenty levels, dealt on your device from the level number, so level 47 is the same board on every phone. A pour moves the whole run of matching colour rather than one band at a time, and a board with nothing left to do says so rather than leaving you tapping at it.
Parking Lot: every car slides only along its own lane, and yours has to reach the gap. One lot a day, scored against par — the true fewest moves, worked out in advance and checked by two independent solvers, rather than the best score somebody happened to manage.
Nonogram: the numbers beside each row and column say how long the runs of filled squares are; work out which, and a picture appears. Forty-six pictures, drawn by hand rather than generated, because the picture at the end is the whole point of the puzzle. Every one is checked to be solvable by reasoning alone — a nonogram that needs a lucky guess is not a logic puzzle, and you would have no way of telling from the inside.
Connect: join each pair of coloured dots, and cover every square while you do it. That second half is what makes it a puzzle rather than a doodle — it forces the routes to work around each other. Forty-eight boards, each built backwards from a finished one, so every board has an answer.
A scorecard behind all nine: streaks, best and average times, and a calendar of the days you played. Signing in with Apple is optional and asks Apple for no name and no email — the app requests no scopes at all. If you do sign in, your games are stored in your own private iCloud database, which reaches your other Apple devices and nowhere else. There is no advertising, no analytics, no third-party code of any kind, and no network requests of the app's own. There is no Plain and Simple server for any of it to reach, because there isn't one.
