Lumines, Hashi, Masyu

I, unfortunately, do not know how well a title would show on your screen if I used kanji and hiragana, so I'm using the romaji. I hope you don't mind.

• Lumines (pron. loo-men-is or loo-meen-ess) is the Japanese response to tetris. Where the tetri, instead of being in different shapes are always square, and the matching occurs on the (one of possibly two) colors. Since tetris is NP-hard, I suppose the same argument can be used for lumines.


• Masyu (pron. ma-shoo) has my attention currently. The connection with lumines? Nothing, except of what we choose to make. One person did make this choice. Puzzle 69 of Nikoli's masyu puzzle collection 1 looks very much like a lumines game in progress. And, since masyu puzzles are NP-hard, we have another similarity.


• Hashi is what I've infected my puzzle-crazed friends with: Mike, Malou, Mike's mom, my cousin Jill and her son have all now the hashi-fever. An unfortunate side effect of this confluence is sometimes confusion. Mike's mom complained to me: "How are you supposed to do these puzzles with no instructions in English? How was I to know that at most two, not three, bridges where allowed between cities?" I swallowed my obvious, but unhelpful, advice: "Well, read the Japanese instructions." and instead offered a sympathetic smile in support.