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The tag looks like it's heading for being our catch-all tag here.

I don't really understand what “brainteaser” means. It's not that far from being a synonym of “puzzle”.

A brain teaser is a form of puzzle that requires thought to solve. [Wikipedia]

a problem for which it is hard to find the answer, especially one which people enjoy trying to solve as a game [Cambridge)

Should we have this tag at all? If so, what should it mean — what types of puzzles do and do not qualify, and when should questions get that tag? Once we get a consensus, this needs to be clearly explained in the tag wiki.

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I would use it for more "unique" puzzles, i.e. problems where you can't produce many different copies from one single set of rules, like you do e.g. with Sudoku. This also seems to be the way it is used right now. Of course, there might be gray areas (take weighing puzzles, for example), and I'm more inclined to use the tag for this purpose, as it is at least a bit more specific.

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  • $\begingroup$ The kind of puzzles you describe sound more like "lateral thinking" rather than pure logic. $\endgroup$
    – DisgruntledGoat
    May 20 '14 at 0:03
  • $\begingroup$ @DisgruntledGoat Not necessarily, I was referring more to questions like Pirates and gold coins, I don't know the two numbers… but now I do, Sliding Bolt Puzzle, ... $\endgroup$
    – diabonas
    May 20 '14 at 16:25
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    $\begingroup$ I'd say the sliding bolt puzzle is mostly logic, while the other two are mainly maths puzzles. So maybe we should have a tag like math-puzzle or numeric-puzzle? $\endgroup$
    – DisgruntledGoat
    May 20 '14 at 22:23
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    $\begingroup$ @DisgruntledGoat This sounds like a reasonable distinction to me. $\endgroup$
    – diabonas
    May 25 '14 at 22:43

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