Medium logic puzzles

The middle of the range. These puzzles have four categories to place, so every neighbour has a name, a door colour or pet, and two more things to pin down. The second half of the set moves up to five houses.

There are fewer direct clues here. You will need to combine two or three clues to make progress, the same skill the classic Einstein’s riddle tests, but with a shorter path to the end.

The puzzles

Play any of them in your browser. Your progress is saved on this device, and every puzzle has the answer at the bottom of its page.

A taste of puzzle 1

4 neighbours live in houses 1 to 4. Here are its clues:

1. The goldfish owner 🐟 is also the coffee drinker ☕.
2. Bram lives directly to the left of the tortoise owner 🐢.
3. The tortoise owner 🐢 lives somewhere to the left of the coffee drinker ☕.
4. The neighbour with the violet door lives directly to the left of the neighbour with the white door.
5. The rabbit owner 🐇 lives next door to the tortoise owner 🐢.
6. Finn lives next door to the cocoa drinker 🍫.
7. Bram is the milk drinker 🥛.
8. The dog owner 🐕 lives directly to the left of Dev.
9. The neighbour with the blue door lives directly to the left of the rabbit owner 🐇.
10. The neighbour with the white door lives next door to the cocoa drinker 🍫.

What makes these harder than the easy set

Most clues are relationships rather than placements: “directly left of”, “next door to”, “somewhere left of”, and “is not”. A “directly left of” clue rules out the last house for one item and the first house for the other, and that alone often starts the puzzle.

When you stall, look at each house in turn and ask what can still go there. A house that has been squeezed down to one option is usually hiding in plain sight.

Ready for more?

Once these feel comfortable, the hard Einstein riddles use five or six houses and five or six categories, the same size as the original.

Or play today’s daily puzzle, a new street every day from a gentle Monday to a fiendish Sunday.