Free Games The puzzle everyone is talking about
This is the popular “place the queens” style of logic puzzle — here played with friendly cats. Each day brings one new board with exactly one answer, and you can always reach it by pure reasoning. Place a cat and faint paw-prints show every square it rules out, so the next step is always visible.
Prefer to practise first?
Play as many boards as you like, at any size, on the regular Cat Sudoku page. Or try today's Daily Sudoku and the other brain puzzles.
The three rules, in full
The board is a grid split into coloured regions. You place one cat in every row, one in every column, and one in every coloured region — and no two cats may ever sit next to each other, including corner to corner. That last rule is the one that catches people out, and it is also the one that makes the puzzle work: without it, most boards would have dozens of answers instead of exactly one.
There are no numbers anywhere. Nothing has to be added up, and nothing has to be remembered from one sitting to the next. If a language other than English is your first, the puzzle plays exactly the same — there is nothing to read on the board.
You never have to guess
Every daily board is checked by a solver before it is published, and only boards with exactly one answer that can be reached by plain reasoning are used. Boards that would need a guess — where you have to try something, see if it breaks, and back out — are thrown away and a new one generated.
That guarantee is the point. If you are stuck, there is always a square somewhere on the board that can be settled by looking, and the Hint button will find it and tell you why it is forced: that a row has only one free square left, or that a colour region is already ruled out everywhere else. It teaches the reasoning rather than just filling the answer in.
How the week is shaped
- Monday and Tuesday are easy — a gentle start, and a good place to begin if today is your first board.
- Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are medium.
- Saturday and Sunday are hard, for the days with more time in them.
The board changes at midnight UTC, and everyone opening this page on the same day gets the identical board — so it is worth asking someone else how they got on.
Your streak, and missing a day
Finishing counts the day. The count lives on your own device, tied to no account, and nobody else can see it. Miss a day and it starts again at one — which is worth saying plainly, because a streak should be a small pleasure rather than a duty. Nobody will email you about it.
If one a day is not enough
The regular Cat Sudoku page lets you play as many boards as you like and choose the size, from a gentle small grid up to something that will take a while. If you would rather have numbers after all, there is today's Daily Sudoku, and the rest of the brain puzzles are one click away.
