The line between games and puzzles

I’ve been trying out Rove (but it will take some more plays before I’m ready to review it and decide if I want to try out the expansions) when I found myself asking what the line was between a puzzle and a solitaire game.

Now, my standard rule of thumb is that if you can do the same action and get the same result every time, it’s a puzzle. The Flipuzzle series, which I quite like, are pure puzzles because _they have a solution_ You could say they have one path to victory.

With that said, it’s fair to say that there is a blurry line between a puzzle and a solitaire game or some forms of cooperative game. I think it comes down to ‘Is there more than one valid option when you have to make a decision?’ Are there multiple paths to victory?

Relatively early in my PnP/solitaire exploration, I tried a couple of very, very simple nine-card games that just involved swapping cards on a grid to form a pattern. I found them relaxing but I couldn’t see them as games. For me, they were puzzles and very simple ones.

The 2019 Soliatire Contest had a varient of that idea called Solitaire Spellbook Swappjng where each card has a one-use movement power which were the only way to move cards. Still more of a puzzle than a game but there were actual choices.

And a game like Rove, with both more random elements and moving parts, feels very safe to call a game. And it’s still the tip of the iceberg. More and more games have solitaire modes, games with heft and depth and complexity.

The more unsolved the piece of media in question is, the more I feel it moves into the game category. I can see how someone can argue that any piece of media where you are playing against a system and not other players has puzzle elements. 

In the end, I think the question matters more to designers than to players. While I am sure there are pure games and pure puzzles, I think viewing some works as blends is more useful.