hard fillomino

About the hard Fillomino

The hard puzzle is a second Fillomino published every day alongside the daily, on the same 7×7 grid but asking a good deal more thinking of you. Same three rules: fill every cell, make each region of equal touching numbers exactly that many cells, and never let two regions of the same size share an edge.

What makes it hard is not the size — it is that the easy moves run out. A daily can usually be carried by looking at one region at a time. A hard grid asks for the deductions further down the ladder: sealed pockets that have to be cut up before you know what is in them, chokepoints a region must pass through, and cells where the only way forward is to assume a value and show that it breaks the board.

Every hard puzzle still has exactly one solution and still needs no guessing, because it is generated by clue-minimising a grid our solver can finish by pure deduction. It is the same puzzle discipline, with the training wheels taken off.

Read the rules and solving techniques · Too much? The regular daily puzzle is gentler