Von very much enjoys efficiency puzzles where the goal is to manage a system that steadily builds up and faces greater challenges. News Tower is her current favorite, and she really enjoyed Book of Hours.

Inspired by this, I was thinking about the kind of discovery/sorting loop where you put stuff together and it makes the next steps easier etc. Spangrams are a little like this - getting the first word is the hardest, and then it all comes together faster and faster towards the end. There's a rather satisfying puzzle that just consists of moving connected nodes around until there are no overlapping connections.

So, can I come up with a puzzle where the satisfaction comes from taking something disordered or messy and the pleasure is in making it neat? What if there was a grid with a mishmash of colours and you could carve out sections of it with (say) tetris pieces to make all the colour areas contiguous? Each turn you take one tetris piece, cookie-cutter out the piece from the existing grid, and move that piece to an open area. Repeat until all colours are contiguous areas. There could be a canonical solve using a fixed set of tetris pieces - in fact, this would be a reasonably easy puzzle to create just by starting with contiguous areas and reversing the process.