Card/board games are about the comparison of game elements, but puzzle games in general are about relations between objects. One detail must be connected with a corresponding detail. The following figure shows a simple puzzle game:
There is a poetic or even philosophical aspect to puzzles: a player attempts to assemble something that once was broken into pieces. He is almost like Kai, a character from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Snow Queen, who was trying to assemble a word—"eternity"—from fragments of broken ice. In a broad sense, each puzzle is an image disassembled into components that are shuffled; some of the details are hidden, some traps and obstacles are scattered, and after that, this "dish" is presented to the player. Now he must find all the invisible strings that connect the elements and must re-form the image. Come to think of it, the most ancient puzzle will have been that of a ceramic vase, accidentally broken, and the craftsman who pieced...