The best indie logic puzzle games for Android and iPhone in 2026 come from studios small enough to answer their own email: Aerli makes you launch paper planes in exactly the right order, Cosmic Express asks you to lay one train track that takes every alien home, Hexologic crosses Sudoku with Kakuro on a hexagonal grid, Marble Sudoku swaps the digits for glossy marbles, LYNE fills a board with lines that must never cross, and Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 turns every room of a dungeon into a single-screen puzzle. Six games, no energy timers, and four of them have no ads at all.
The household names of the genre, from Sudoku to nonograms and Flow Free, already live in our ranking of the best logic puzzle games for Android and iPhone. This collection is for the smaller ones: games made by one person or a studio of a few, each built around a rule you have not seen a hundred times. It belongs to our indie section.
How we picked
This collection was put together by Lisa, chief editor at MadFox, with our CEO Ilya Azarov. The rules: a solo developer or a small independent studio; a logic mechanic of its own rather than a reskin of a classic; puzzles you solve by thinking, not by luck or reflexes; and monetisation that never sells you the answer. Ads are acceptable when they stay out of the way, and games with nothing to buy after the price tag get a special mention. Every price, rating and install count was checked on Google Play and the App Store on October 4, 2026.
1. Aerli: Paper Plane Puzzle
Interesting concept — that is our editorial mark for games where the idea is bigger than the budget. Aerli is built on one question: in which order do the planes take off? Every paper plane on the board points somewhere, and a tap launches it along that line. A plane can only leave if its flight path is clear, so one careless launch can leave the rest of the board stuck. Each level is a compact grid that looks trivial for about three seconds, until you notice that the plane you want to send first is blocking the one that has to go before it.
The 120 handcrafted levels are spread across six worlds, and the worlds add mechanics on top of the launch rule: locks and keys, planes flying in formation, portals. The controls are a single tap in portrait mode. There is no countdown timer, undo and hint tools are there for when you want to rethink a move, and Perfect Flight goals reward a cleaner solution for players who want mastery rather than just a cleared board. If you liked the arrow rule of Crosswise Arrows from our indie match-3 and merge collection, Aerli is its calmer, airborne cousin.
Aerli is made by MingosLab (the developer name on Google Play is Mingos). It is a fresh release: free with ads, Android only for now, last updated on September 26, 2026, and still counted in the dozens of installs. You are early, which is the point of this section.
In short: Android only · free, contains ads · 120 levels in six worlds · indie: MingosLab
Cosmic Express is the veteran of this list and still one of the cleanest puzzle ideas on a phone. Each level is a tiny space station floating in the dark. You lay a single train track from the entrance to the exit, and the train has to pick up every alien on the way and drop each one at its own home. The catch is the passenger car: there is room for one alien at a time, the track cannot cross itself, and the station is never quite big enough for the route you have in mind. It looks cute, and the developers themselves call the puzzle design fiendishly difficult.
The game comes from Draknek & Friends, the small studio of puzzle designer Alan Hazelden, who is also behind A Monster's Expedition and Sokobond. The art is by Tyu Orphinae and the relaxing ambient soundtrack by Nick Dymond. There are hundreds of levels, the price is $5.99 once on both stores, and there are no ads and no in-app purchases. On Google Play it has passed fifty thousand installs, the most in this collection, and the App Store version holds a 4.8 rating. It was a finalist at IMGA Global 2017 and an official selection of the Indie Megabooth at GDC 2017.
No ads, ever · Android and iPhone · $5.99 one-time · indie: Draknek & Friends
Hexologic takes the arithmetic of Kakuro and the calm of Sudoku and lays them out on hexagons. Each puzzle is a small honeycomb with numbers at its edges. You fill the hexagons with dots, and the dots along every line, in each of the three directions a hex grid allows, have to add up to the number written at the edge of that line. Every board can be solved by deduction, but because each hexagon sits on three lines at once, every dot you place pulls on its neighbours in three directions.
It is made by MythicOwl, a small studio from Poland, and it is as much a mood piece as a puzzle: six worlds, each with its own look and its own twist on the rules, more than ninety levels and a relaxing soundtrack. Hexologic costs $2.99 on both stores with no ads and no in-app purchases. It has more than ten thousand installs on Google Play with a 4.6 rating, and close to a thousand App Store ratings averaging 4.7.
In short: Android and iPhone · $2.99 one-time, no ads, no purchases · indie: MythicOwl, Poland
A good logic puzzle explains its rules once and never cheats after that. Aerli does it with one tap, LYNE with a few lines, Cosmic Express with one track. None of them sells you the answer.
— Ilya Azarov, CEO
4. Marble Sudoku
Marble Sudoku keeps the rules everyone knows, a 9×9 board where nothing may repeat in a row, a column or a region, and replaces the digits with glossy coloured marbles on a wooden board. It sounds cosmetic until you play: colours read differently from numbers, and spotting the missing shade in a row is a small skill of its own. The game is styled after Japanese interiors, with paper screens and a sleepy cat, and the sounds and haptics are tuned to make every placed marble feel satisfying.
Where it stops being just a pretty Sudoku is the modes. Countdown adds time for every correct move, Boulder Garden puts stone obstacles on the board that you break by solving around them, Mosaic swaps the 3×3 boxes for irregular jigsaw regions, and a Daily Challenge keeps a streak going; a real-time Duel is announced as coming soon. Notes, smart hints, validation and undo are all there, and the game plays without an internet connection. It is the work of Alla Kuznetsova, who runs Luma Play as a solo developer in Germany. Marble Sudoku appeared on the App Store in March 2026, is free with ads and optional purchases, and has passed ten thousand installs on Google Play with a 4.3 rating.
In short: Android and iPhone · free, ads and optional purchases · plays offline · solo developer: Luma Play, Germany
LYNE is the most minimal game here and possibly the purest. The board is a grid of shapes: triangles, squares, diamonds and grey octagons. You draw one line per kind of shape, from its outlined start to its outlined end, through every shape of that kind. Lines may not cross, and by the end every tile on the board has to be used. The octagons are junctions that several lines share, and the dots on an octagon tell you how many times lines must pass through it. A couple of minutes in, you stop drawing and start counting.
It was made by Thomas Bowker, won Best Puzzle Game at the Tabby Awards 2014 and was an IndieCade 2014 finalist, and it has quietly stayed in the stores for more than a decade: both versions were updated in late 2025. There are hundreds of handmade puzzles plus new procedurally generated ones every day, unlockable colour palettes and soothing dynamic audio. It costs $2.99 on both stores with no ads and no in-app purchases, has more than ten thousand installs on Google Play and a 4.9 rating on the App Store.
No ads, ever · Android and iPhone · $2.99 one-time · indie: Thomas Bowker
Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 looks like a dungeon crawler and plays like a book of logic problems. Every level is a single room that fits on the screen: a few monsters, a trap, a door and a key, a channel of water or a jet of fire. Getting through is not a question of fighting faster but of working out the right sequence of steps, and the solution, once it clicks, is usually short and a little bit cheeky.
You play a priestess of the Order of the Flame sent into Dreadrock Mountain to find the Crown of Wisdom, across 100 handcrafted levels; it is the second episode of the Dungeons of Dreadrock trilogy. The series is the work of one developer, Christoph Minnameier, and its store page lists wins at the DevGAMM Awards, the Tencent GWB Awards and the DEVCOM Awards. Episode 2 is a one-time purchase with no ads or in-app purchases: $1.99 on the App Store and $5.99 on Google Play at the time of checking. If you want to try the style first, the original Dungeons of Dreadrock is free and has passed a million installs on Google Play.
In short: Android and iPhone · paid once, no ads, no purchases · 100 levels · solo developer: Christoph Minnameier
Which of these indie logic puzzle games have no ads?
Cosmic Express, Hexologic, LYNE and Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 are paid once and have no ads and no in-app purchases. Aerli and Marble Sudoku are free and show ads, and Marble Sudoku also has optional purchases.
Which of them are on iPhone?
Five of the six: Cosmic Express, Hexologic, Marble Sudoku, LYNE and Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 are on both the App Store and Google Play. Aerli is Android only as of October 2026.
Which game is best for beginners?
Marble Sudoku, because the rules are the Sudoku rules you already know, and Aerli, which teaches its single rule in the first levels and gives you undo and hints. Hexologic also starts gently. LYNE and Cosmic Express get hard quickly, and that is exactly their appeal.
Which one is the hardest?
Cosmic Express: its developers describe the puzzle design as fiendishly difficult, and the later stations take real planning. The later sets of LYNE come a close second.
How are these different from Sudoku and nonogram apps?
The classics live in our ranking of the best logic puzzle games for Android and iPhone. Here every game brings its own rule: launch order in Aerli, routes in Cosmic Express, sums on hexagons in Hexologic, colours instead of digits in Marble Sudoku, paths that never cross in LYNE and dungeon rooms as puzzles in Dungeons of Dreadrock 2.
About the Mad Fox indie section
In this section we write about games from small studios: reviews, collections and developer stories. If you make a mobile game and would like us to look at it, email hello@madfox.dev with a store link and a few words about what makes the game yours. We check both stores before we publish.