Tangler is a small casual puzzle inspired by the Tantrix board game but with a different twist.

Game objective: put randomly generated tiles to the board, making up continuous color curves. When curves close to loops, they disappear, giving space for more moves.

There are 3 board sizes, 3 tile types and up to 6 colors with an option of unique/repeating colors per tile.

The game is intended to be meditative, like creating a mandala, so there is no game timer and no hall of fame. There are also no sound, no ads and no in-game purchases. The game is completely free and will remain so. It does not use Internet connection and does not require any device permissions.

The game is playable on smartphones, especially with smaller board sizes, but a larger (tablet) screen is recommended for best experience.

The game is provided in two options:

• Desktop Java. Download Tangler.jar. Run it with java -jar Tangler.jar command line, or in most cases just double-click the Tangler.jar file. It has been tested with Java 18 Runtime, should also work with prior versions up to Java 8.

  • On MacOS you will get a warning about unidentified developer. Start the Tangler.jar using Finder context menu instead of Launchpad, as explained here .

• Android. Get it on Google Play (recommended) or download the Tangler.apk here for manual install (it might be sometimes also a newer version due to the Google Play approval lag). It has been tested on Android 8.0 and 10.0, should also work on any Android version starting from 4.4 and later.

  • Known issues on Xiaomi smartphones: Last move might be lost when you switch from Tangler to another app and back again. That is the Xiaomi issue, I do not know a workaround yet.

There is no iOS build because I do not have tools to test and deploy it to the AppStore. If somebody completes the iOS module (see below), I will add it here.

If you like the game and want to support the author, you may donate arbitrary amount via following link: https://pay.fondy.eu/s/3DJ4BV1DmBgU (processed by the Fondy.eu payment system).

The game is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Please feel free to reuse, extend, derive, improve etc. as long as you keep a reference to the original and mention me, Andrzej Novosiolov, as the original author.

The game has been implemented using following tools and libraries:

• IntelliJ IDEA 2024.1.4 (Community Edition)
• Android Studio 2024.1.1 Patch 1 (for the Android emulator)
• Gradle 8.2.2
• Kotlin 2.0.0
• libGDX 1.12.1
• libKTX 1.12.1-rc1
• ShapeDrawer 2.6.0
• Universal Tween Engine 6.3.3
• Free icons from https://www.flaticon.com/

The ios module is present in the project and compiling, but I did not tested it because I do not have Apple devices and tools for that. If you make it work, I would gratefully accept the pull request.