24 Best Nintendo 3DS Puzzle Games

Tipping Stars is the Mario vs. Donkey Kong game where you guide Mario Minis to the exit door with the stylus. The little wind-up toys march along on their own, and your job is to change the level around them so they get there in one piece. As in the earlier games, you can build your own levels and share them online. The twist is in the name: players could tip level creators with stars, which paid for new parts in the level editor.

It came out worldwide in March 2015 and was the first Nintendo game with cross-buy, so buying it on one system gave you a free code for the other. Critics liked the challenge and the soundtrack but found it short. With the eShop gone, it is no longer sold outside Japan.

Amiibo Challenge is a free spin-off of the same idea, released for the 3DS and Wii U in 2016. You tap an amiibo figure to guide one of 11 minis through the levels, using the stylus to move parts of each stage so they survive. Specific figures unlock minis with their own tricks, like mini Mario's wall jump or mini Yoshi, who can eat enemies.

That is also its weak spot. To reach 100% completion you need an amiibo for 10 Mario characters and have to play every core level three times, which makes it a game for people who already own a shelf of little plastic plumbers. For a free download, reviewers still found the levels decent.

Color Zen is the calmest game on this list. It calls itself a new kind of puzzle game, with simple controls and an abstract world of color to move through. There are no points and no penalties for failure, and the game asks you to put on headphones and go at your own pace.

It first came out in 2013 and reached the 3DS in 2014. Next to the big Nintendo games around it, it is a tiny thing. It earns its spot as the game to play when a Layton puzzle has fried your brain and you want something that will never tell you that you got it wrong.

Katrielle and the Millionaire's Conspiracy is the seventh main entry in the Layton series, and the professor himself is missing. His daughter Katrielle sets up the Layton Detective Agency in London, hoping the cases will turn up clues about where he went. She has an assistant, Ernest Greeves, and a talking dog that only the two of them can understand. You solve case after case around London's landmarks, from the Houses of Parliament to Tower Bridge, with puzzles all the way.

It came out on the 3DS and on phones in 2017. Critics found too many duds in the puzzle pile this time, and the music and backgrounds got repetitive. Free daily puzzles were promised for up to a year after release, which helped.

Miracle Cure is a Dr. Mario made by Arika and Nintendo SPD for the 3DS, out on the eShop in June 2015. It has three main game modes, and the new idea is in the title: power-ups that can save a board full of viruses. It also added online play.

Critics praised the new modes and the online mode, but the older modes felt simpler than the versions in earlier games. One reviewer called the multiplayer the highlight. In Japan it went straight to third place on the eShop chart, behind The Battle Cats POP! and BoxBoy!, and it stayed on the chart until September 2015. If you just want pills and viruses on the go, it does the job.

Bye-Bye BoxBoy! is the third BoxBoy! game, released worldwide in 2017. Qbby now has to rescue little creatures called Qbabies across 18 worlds, and every Qbaby you save gives him a new power. The Boxrocket hits buttons that are too high to reach, and other new boxes let him hover and warp. New hazards like Black Smoke and strong winds keep you on your toes.

Critics liked it best of the whole series: it scored 83 out of 100, the highest of the four games. There are hundreds of puzzles, and it is the right place to finish once BoxBoy! and BoxBoxBoy! have taught you how Qbby thinks. The next game in the series moved to the Switch.

Crosswords Plus is exactly what it says on the box. It has professionally designed crossword puzzles at every difficulty from Easy to Expert, plus Giant Crosswords, Word of the Day, Wordsearch and Anagrams. New puzzles arrived through SpotPass at no extra charge, and you could share bonus puzzles with other players through StreetPass.

It came out in 2012, and it is the game for anyone who wanted the newspaper puzzle page on a handheld. Filling in letters with the stylus feels right for a crossword. It is the plainest game on this list, and nobody who buys it wants it any other way.

BoxBoxBoy! is the second BoxBoy! game, released in Japan in January 2016 and everywhere else in June. The big change is that Qbby can now make two sets of boxes at once. That sounds small, but two chains give you many more ways to solve a room, and the levels get trickier quickly.

HAL Laboratory made it with the same director, Yasuhiro Mukae. Critics scored it 80 out of 100, the same as the first game. If BoxBoy! clicked with you, this is more of it with a second pair of hands, and it is short enough to finish in a few evenings.

Minis on the Move came out on the eShop on May 9, 2013, in Europe and North America. You place blocks on a game board to build a path for a Mini, who walks on his own and has to reach the goal in a fixed amount of time. Power-ups wait along the way. A level editor let you build your own boards and share them online, until the online features were retired in April 2024.

Critics praised its puzzle design and the level editor. It plays a bit like a pipe puzzle with Mario walking through the pipes, and the timer keeps it tense. Of the Mini games on the 3DS, this is the one to start with.

Tetris Ultimate was Ubisoft's game for the 30th anniversary of Tetris, made with The Tetris Company. The 3DS version has seven modes, including a new single-player Challenge mode. It came out in 2014, three years after Tetris: Axis.

Axis has far more modes, so Ultimate suits anyone who wants plain Tetris without the party extras. It is a clean, solid version of the most famous puzzle game ever made, and on a handheld that is all some of us need.

Picross e is Jupiter's first picross game for the 3DS eShop and the successor to Mario's Picross and Picross DS. You use numbers as hints to fill in squares on a grid, and a finished grid turns into a picture. Nintendo has been making these picture crossword puzzles as its own brand since 1995.

Players call the series great and a cheap, easy way into picross. Jupiter kept making more volumes, and on 29 February 2024, a year after the shop closed, it put every Picross e puzzle into one collection called Picross S+. Some of the finished pictures are charmingly bad, which is half the fun.

Tetris: Axis came out in October 2011, published by Nintendo in North America, and it has more than 20 different modes. In Fit, pieces fly at a wall with a hole cut out of it and you have to make them fit through. Bombliss Plus puts a bomb inside every piece, and clearing a row with one in it blows up everything around it.

Up to eight players can battle over local wireless, even if only one of them has a game card. It also plays in 3D with no glasses needed, which was still a magic trick in 2011. If you want one Tetris on the system with the most to do, this is it.

Concentration Training is the fourth major Brain Age game and the first made for the 3DS. It came out in Japan in July 2012 and in North America in February 2013, but Europe waited until July 2017. Dr. Kawashima is fully voiced this time. Devilish Training changes its difficulty as you go, and it only stays the same if you get between 66 and 84% right.

It also has small puzzle games like Blob Blast and Germ Buster, inspired by Wario's Woods and Dr. Mario. Review scores came to about 70 out of 100, which feels fair for a game that is more homework than play. Still, the homework is good for you.

Stretchmo is the fourth Pushmo game, and it came out on the 3DS eShop in May 2015. In Europe and Australia it is called Fullblox. It was free to start: you got the tutorial and paid for the levels after it. The new ideas are enemy characters and blocks that stretch out into platforms, which turns Mallo's climbing into a bigger game of pulling things into place.

Players who love Pushmo put Stretchmo right next to it, and its harder puzzles are some of the best brain benders in the series. Its Welcome Center music later turned up in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, where Mallo is a Spirit.

Azran Legacy is the sixth Layton game and the end of the prequel trilogy. Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino meant it to be the last game starring the professor himself. You travel the world on the airship Bostonius, solving puzzles themed to each place and helping the locals, including a jungle chief who needs his sense of humor back.

North America got it last, on February 28, 2014. The music is by Tomohito Nishiura, as in every Layton game before it, with Surely Someday over the credits. It can stand on its own, but it means a lot more if you played Miracle Mask first, and the ending is the most dramatic in the series.

Miracle Mask was Professor Layton's first adventure on the 3DS. It takes him, Luke and Emmy to the city of Monte d'Or, where a mysterious man is causing havoc with the Mask of Chaos. The 3DS changed how you explore: you move a magnifying glass on the touch screen to search the scene on the top screen. Midway through there is even a top-down section where a young Layton explores an underground ruin.

There are hundreds of puzzles in the story, and 365 more came as downloads, seven a week for a year. It is the middle part of the prequel trilogy that Azran Legacy finishes, so it is the place to start on the 3DS.

Pokémon Picross was first planned for the Game Boy Color in 2000 and then cancelled. Fifteen years later it was revived, announced in a Nintendo Direct and released on the 3DS eShop worldwide in December 2015. The twist is that every finished puzzle gives you a Pokémon based on the picture you uncovered.

Critics liked the puzzles but not the free-to-play side of it. Even so, a free game packed with solid picross was an easy thing to recommend, and catching Pokémon with a pencil is a very good idea.

Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright puts two of the DS's biggest puzzle heroes in one game, made by Capcom and Level-5 together. They end up in Labyrinthia, a medieval town where people live in fear of witchcraft. You explore and solve puzzles the Layton way, then defend your client in court the Phoenix way, now with group cross-examinations where you play one witness against another.

Ace Attorney director Shu Takumi helped with the scenario. It was the first time Ace Attorney had voice acting and animated cutscenes, which became the standard for that series from Dual Destinies on. Japan had it in November 2012, but North America waited until August 2014.

Crashmo is the sequel to Pushmo, known as Fallblox in Europe and Australia, and it came out on the 3DS eShop in 2012. Mallo is back, and this time the blocks fall when nothing holds them up, so a careless move can bring a whole tower down. You push and slide the pieces around until there is a way to the top.

Players agree it is much harder than Pushmo, and it gets hard early. If Pushmo felt too easy, this is the cure. It stopped being sold when the eShop closed on March 27, 2023, so anyone who has it should hang on to that 3DS.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker started on the Wii U in 2014 and came to the 3DS and Switch in 2018 with extra content. It is a spin-off of the Super Mario series that grew out of Super Mario 3D World, and the developers had wanted to make those levels into a full game since the start of 3D World's development. Toad can't jump, so each level is a little box of a world that you turn with the camera until you see the way to the treasure.

The team made camera control a must on purpose, to teach players who had never used it. Critics praised the graphics and the concept. It is the gentlest 3D puzzle game on the system and a good one to share with a younger player.

Pokémon Shuffle is a free matching game where you move Pokémon around a board to bring a wild Pokémon's HP to zero within a set number of moves. There is no time limit, so you can study the board as long as you like. Each Pokémon has a type, and a Mega-Evolved Pokémon can clear out a whole heap of the board at once. Beat a stage and you get a chance to catch the Pokémon you fought.

The catch is the Hearts system, where a single heart takes 30 minutes to come back, and one reviewer singled it out. It still had 6.5 million downloads by July 2017, which is a lot of people waiting on hearts.

Picross 3D: Round 2 is the sequel to the 2009 DS game Picross 3D. You chip away at a block using number clues until the object hidden inside appears. The new rule is color: blue blocks stay square, and orange blocks turn into curved or cut-out shapes when you fill them in, so the finished models look far more detailed. There are more than 300 puzzles, plus 10 more for amiibo owners.

Japan got it in October 2015, but North America waited until September 2016, and only as an eShop download. Players call it one of their favorite puzzle games and tell you to grab it fast. One player warned that Picross 3D "will steal your life and you'll thank it."

BoxBoy! is a puzzle platformer from HAL Laboratory, released on the 3DS in Japan on January 14, 2015. You play Qbby, a box-shaped hero who can grow boxes out of his own body. He uses them to reach high ledges or block deadly lasers, and if he hooks a chain onto a ledge he can pull himself up. Each level gives you a set number of boxes, and the crowns in it vanish if you use too many.

Critics gave it 80 out of 100 and liked the black-and-white style and how complex the puzzles get. Players who love Pushmo name BoxBoy! in the same breath. It led to two more games on the 3DS and a fourth on the Switch.

Pushmo is set in a park full of climbing toys built by a kindly old inventor. A little trickster has trapped kids inside them, and you play Mallo, who has to push, pull and climb his way up to each one. There are more than 250 puzzles, and new gadgets keep turning up to make them harder. Finish certain sets and you open Pushmo Studio, where you can make your own Pushmo and share them.

It is called Pullblox in Europe and Australia, and it led to Crashmo, Pushmo World on the Wii U and Stretchmo. Players call it brilliant and still wish the series had kept going. Players recommend it more than any other 3DS puzzle game.