The name on the store, and who is behind it

Who publishes, and from where

That is the whole of it. Stone Bruzs is a name used on the store rather than a company with staff behind it, and this page says so plainly instead of writing "we" and letting a reader imagine a building. Where a notice has to name someone answerable — a privacy policy, a store listing, a support request — the person named is Maris Bruzs, at the address above.

Small puzzle games, built end to end

One person designs the game, writes it, tests it, ships it to Google Play and then keeps it working as Android shifts underneath. Nothing is subcontracted and nothing is white-labelled from elsewhere.

The preference runs to puzzles that need no explaining: a rule a player can absorb in a sentence, and a difficulty curve that does the teaching instead of a tutorial. Offline, because a puzzle has no business needing a network. No account, because a puzzle has no business knowing who you are.

There is also an app on the store, described at the foot of this page — last, because a name is not its newest release.

Writing in

Anything general goes to post@stonebruzs.lol. Anything about Kolbe — a bug, a level that seems wrong, a question about data — goes to glass@stonebruzs.lol. Both arrive at the same desk; splitting them only keeps the two sorts of post apart.

English and Norwegian are equally welcome. Nothing automated replies, so if two working days pass in silence, take it that the message went astray and send it again.

The second spare flask is the whole game

Here is something about sorting puzzles worth checking rather than assuming. Fill a row of flasks with coloured liquid in four-unit layers, all jumbled, and give yourself some empty flasks to work with. How much does a spare flask actually buy you?

Pick a square below — colours down the side, spare flasks across the top — with a click or the arrow keys.

The pattern does not bend. With a single spare flask, a shelf you were handed at random may simply have no solution — and the bigger the shelf, the likelier that is: roughly three in four survive at three colours, one in two at four, close to one in four at five. Add a second spare and the floor falls out of the problem: across every case tried, not one shelf was unsolvable. A third spare adds nothing at all, because there was nothing left to add.

How it was checked: for three colours the whole space was enumerated — all 5,892 distinct starting shelves — and each one handed to a solver that explores every legal pour until it either sorts the shelf or exhausts the possibilities. Four and five colours are far too large to enumerate, so those squares are random samples, 2,000 shelves each at one and two spares and 800 at three, solved the same exhaustive way.

Kolbe

A calm sorting puzzle on an apothecary's shelf of glass flasks. Each flask holds a stack of jumbled colours; you pour between them until every flask holds just one. A colour may only go onto the same colour or into an empty flask, and only as far as there is room — a rule small enough to state in a line and awkward enough to think about for an hour.

Every level is verified solvable before it ships, and a move target rewards tidy solutions. Shades are chosen to stay distinguishable for colour-blind players, with optional patterns. Offline throughout, with no account to create and nothing advertised — which is what makes the privacy policy as brief as it turns out to be.