N-Puzzle is a free website with daily puzzles about Nintendo games. No company, no team, no editorial staff: the site is built and maintained by one person in their spare time.
N-Puzzle is run by one person in southern Germany, not a company and not a team. Development, data maintenance, the texts and the replies to messages all come from the same desk. Full provider identification is in the legal notice.
That also explains the pace: new features arrive whenever there is time next to work and everyday life, and replies to messages sometimes take a few days.
The idea came from a simple observation. Daily Wordle-style puzzles exist for football, for films, for music, for Pokémon. Nothing comparable existed for Nintendo games in the wider sense, even though few gaming histories are as well documented or as well suited to categories. Between the NES era of the 80s and the Switch 2 there are five decades, dozens of platforms and a handful of very idiosyncratic franchises.
The template for the grid format is named openly: PokeDoku and the Immaculate Grid from US sports made the mechanic popular. The implementation, the category system, the puzzle generator and the database are original work.
NintenDoku is a 3x3 grid. Every cell needs a Nintendo game that matches both its row category and its column category. Twelve guesses, every entry counts, no game can be used twice. There is also a hardcore mode on a 4x4 grid and an unlimited mode with endless random grids.
Perfect Game runs over three rounds with several games each. Each round asks for the highest value: worldwide sales, the Metacritic user score and the critic score. One attempt per round, and the titles you picked turn into your own mashup cover to share.
Alongside them sits Best Nintendo Games, a ranking rebuilt every day by franchise, genre, platform and release year.
Both games draw from the same database of over 1,250 titles. It is the most time-consuming part of the project and entirely handmade. A game gets an entry if it meets one of three conditions:
Only the first release is recorded, not every later port. Each entry carries a release date, the region of first release, platform, genre, developing studio, franchise, sales figures and scores. Those fields are what the puzzle categories are built from.
Scores come from Metacritic, with critic and user scores kept separate. Playtimes come from HowLongToBeat, always the main story, and are only shown when enough submissions exist there. Sales figures come from publisher quarterly and annual reports, supplemented by industry reporting for older titles. Everything is recorded per platform, so collections and re-releases are not folded in.
At this scale, mistakes are unavoidable. Anyone who spots a wrong value or reports a missing game genuinely helps the project. The fastest route is the contact page.
Daily puzzles are not rolled in your browser. They are pre-computed on the server overnight, which is why every player worldwide gets the same puzzle. The daily reset happens at 6:00 German time.
Before a puzzle goes live, the generator checks every category pairing for whether it can be solved at all and whether enough matching titles exist. Combinations that are technically possible but would only work with a single obscure title get filtered out. On top of that, the category groups rotate, so the same console does not define an axis three days in a row.
The ranking on Best Nintendo Games is not an editorial opinion and not a copy of someone else's list. It is built from actual play in NintenDoku: it counts which games the community placed correctly into a matching cell. A game ranks high because many people know it and can recall it under pressure, not because it scored 95 somewhere. The evaluation is rebuilt daily and carries a date stamp.
So far it does not carry itself. Domain, hosting and database run out of pocket. Advertising and affiliate links are planned, alongside an optional Plus tier with extra features and voluntary support via Ko-fi.
Two commitments on that: the games themselves stay free in full, and inside the EU no advertising is served until consent has been given in the consent dialog. While advertising is inactive, the site loads no ad scripts and sets no advertising cookies. What is active at any given time is documented in the privacy policy.
N-Puzzle is an unofficial fan project and has no connection to Nintendo Co., Ltd. or any other company mentioned. It is neither operated nor endorsed nor reviewed by Nintendo. All game titles, brand names and logos belong to their respective owners. The site does not distribute anyone's game content, images or audio; it processes facts about games in an original puzzle format.
One more common mix-up: this site has nothing to do with the classic sliding puzzle of numbered tiles that computer science also calls the "N-Puzzle". Here, N-Puzzle stands for Nice-Puzzle.
Found a mistake, missing a game, got an idea for a new category? All of it can come straight to me, either through the contact page or by mail to info@n-puzzle.com. Public discussion and feedback happen in the community at r/N_Puzzles.
Looking for the games? NintenDoku · Perfect Game · Best Nintendo Games