Select a puzzle to begin
Choose a preset puzzle from the sidebar, or create your own logic grid challenge.
Choose a preset puzzle from the sidebar, or create your own logic grid challenge.
After 12 RageBuilder projects dominated by canvas-based visualizations and Web Audio sonification, Clue Craft deliberately breaks the pattern entirely. Research into logic puzzle tools revealed that while many sites host static puzzles (Puzzle Baron, Brainzilla), there are almost no interactive tools that let you both design and solve logic grid puzzles with real-time constraint validation. This project fills that gap — it's a pure deduction tool, not a visualization.
Clue Craft is an interactive Logic Grid Puzzle designer and solver. These puzzles — also called "Einstein's Zebra Puzzles" or "logic grid puzzles" — challenge you to deduce the correct matching of items across categories using a set of clues. For example: "The Englishman lives in the red house" tells you those two attributes go together.
The app provides preset puzzles of varying difficulty, an interactive grid where you mark matches and eliminations, real-time deduction hints, and an auto-solver that uses constraint satisfaction algorithms to find the answer.
Grid System: Each category pair gets its own sub-grid. Cells represent whether two entries from different categories match. You mark cells as ✓ (confirmed match), ✗ (eliminated), or leave them blank (unknown).
Constraint Parsing: Clues are parsed for keywords like "is in", "does not", "next to", and ordinal positions ("first", "last"). Each clue becomes a formal constraint that the solver checks against.
Auto-Deduction: When you mark a cell as a match, the app automatically eliminates all other cells in that row and column (since each entry can only match once per category). It also cross-references across grids for compound deductions.
Auto-Solver: Uses a backtracking search algorithm with constraint propagation. Each category's entries are assigned to positions, and the solver tries all valid combinations until it finds one satisfying every clue. Arc consistency pruning eliminates impossible assignments early.