The History of Detective Logic Puzzles
Logic puzzles in which a small case is solved by reasoning alone are much older than computers.
Puzzles That Tell a Story
Logic puzzles of this kind - a short story, a handful of facts and exactly one answer that fits them all - became a fixture of puzzle magazines in the twentieth century. Their best-known ancestor is the so-called Zebra puzzle, printed in the magazine Life International in 1962: five houses, five residents, five pets and a list of clues from which you work out who owns the zebra.
It is often called Einstein's puzzle and said to be solvable by only two percent of people. There is no evidence for either claim: no one knows who wrote it.
Mysteries Solved by Reasoning
Detective stories made the idea of solving a mystery from clues popular from the nineteenth century on. Puzzle makers borrowed it: a “who did it?” question turns a logic grid into a small case to crack.
The placing rules here come from another family of pen-and-paper puzzles. In Star Battle, created by Hans Eendebak for the 2003 World Puzzle Championship in the Netherlands, stars are placed in the regions of a grid, and no two stars may touch, not even diagonally. This game uses that kind of rule for rooms and suspects and adds a small case to solve.
How PaperGames Builds Each Case
Every case here comes from PaperGames's own generator. It draws random rooms, places one suspect in each room so that no two touch, lays the cake next to exactly one of them and shows it on the floor plan, then adds true clues until exactly one placement fits, and removes every clue that is not needed.
A second solver that reasons step by step then checks that the case can be solved without guessing; on Hard it sometimes has to think one step ahead. Depending on the theme, the suspects are animals or people and the case is a missing cake or a hidden treasure, so the puzzle stays friendly for children.