Free printable Heyawake with answers
A Heyawake is a shading puzzle played on a grid cut into rooms. A numbered room holds exactly that many shaded squares, shaded squares never touch side by side, the unshaded squares all join up, and no straight run of unshaded squares may cross two room walls. That last rule is what makes it: it constrains rooms with no number on them at all, which is why most of a hard board can be blank and still pin itself.
By size
A bigger board cut into more rooms is harder, and so is leaving more of those rooms without a number. Measured as the search it takes to prove the answer unique, the top grade is about twenty times the first.
Easy Heyawake
Free printable easy Heyawake puzzles with answers. A small board, ten rooms, and most of them numbered. Print with the answer. No sign-up.
Medium Heyawake
Free printable medium Heyawake puzzles with answers. An eight by eight board where half the rooms are blank.
Hard Heyawake
Free printable hard Heyawake puzzles with answers. A ten by ten board cut into twenty-seven rooms, with most of them blank.
Expert Heyawake
Free printable expert Heyawake puzzles with answers. A twelve by twelve board where three rooms in five carry no number at all.
Evil Heyawake
Free printable evil Heyawake puzzles with answers. The biggest board we print, with two thirds of its rooms blank. Still exactly one answer.
By audience
Heyawake has numbers on it and no arithmetic in it, which makes it an unusually easy puzzle to hand to someone who says they are not a numbers person.
Heyawake for beginners
Free printable Heyawake puzzles for beginners with answers. Learn the run rule on a small board, with the answer on page two.
Heyawake, a logic puzzle with no arithmetic
Free printable logic puzzles with no sums in them. The numbers count squares in a room; nothing is ever added up.
Large print Heyawake
Free printable large print Heyawake puzzles with answers. A small board printed big, with the room walls easy to see. No sign-up.
One shading, every time
This is the guarantee that takes real work here, and the generator does something no other engine of ours does to get it: it runs the solver backwards. It cuts the rooms, then asks the solver for one answer to a board with no numbers at all, which is a real Heyawake and a wildly ambiguous one. Whatever comes back obeys every rule except the room counts, and those are then read off it. Only then is the hard part tested, which is whether the numbers pin that shading and no other. Every puzzle here is checked by the same solver our Publisher Studio uses. The answer prints at the back.
How to solve a heyawake
The grid is cut into rooms. Shade squares so that a numbered room holds exactly that many shaded squares, no two shaded squares touch side by side, the unshaded squares all join up, and no straight run of unshaded squares crosses two room walls.
The method
- 1Start with the rooms numbered zero. A 0 means nothing in that room is shaded, which is free information and usually opens a corner. A room whose number equals the most it could possibly hold is just as free: in a room one square wide, a number that fills every other square leaves no choice at all.
- 2Count the rooms a run crosses, not the squares. This is the rule the whole puzzle turns on and the one beginners skip. Look along any row or column: if three squares in a row would be unshaded and they sit in three different rooms, one of them has to be shaded. It works in rooms with no number at all, which is why most of the board can be blank.
- 3Shade one square and you have ruled out four. Shaded squares never touch side by side, so every square you shade makes its four neighbours unshaded. Mark them, because those unshaded squares are what the run rule reads next.
- 4Keep the unshaded squares joined up. They have to form one single region at the end. If shading a square would wall a group of unshaded squares off from the rest, it cannot be shaded, however well it suits the numbers.
- The one rule people get wrong
- The run rule counts ROOM WALLS crossed, not squares. A run of six unshaded squares is perfectly legal if they all sit in one room, and a run of three is illegal if it touches three rooms. That is why the walls are printed heavier than the grid.
- What the answer page shows
- The same grid with every shaded square filled in. Where a number sits on a square the answer shades, it is printed in white so you can still read it.
- How the grades differ
- A bigger board cut into more rooms, with more of those rooms left without a number. The easy grades number most rooms; the hardest leaves two thirds of them blank and leans on the run rule instead.
- Is it the same as nurikabe?
- No. Both shade a grid and both keep the unshaded squares connected, but in nurikabe the numbers give the size of unshaded islands and the shaded squares are meant to join up, while here the numbers count shaded squares inside a room and it is the shaded squares that may never touch.
- Good for
- Anyone who likes a rule that rewards looking along a line.
Make one now
Pick a board, then print the puzzle and its answer. No sign-up, no watermark.