Free printable Nurikabe with answers
A Nurikabe is a shading puzzle made of islands and the sea between them. Every number is an island of that many unshaded squares, each island holds exactly one number, no two islands touch side by side, and everything left over is one connected shaded sea with no two-by-two block anywhere in it. It is the rare logic puzzle that turns into a picture as you finish it.
By size
A bigger board is harder, and so is letting one island grow larger: a board of threes and fours is read almost by inspection, while an island of nine has a shape to work out. Measured as the search it takes to prove the answer unique, the top grade is about twenty-four times the first.
Easy Nurikabe
Free printable easy Nurikabe puzzles with answers. A small board, small islands, and enough ones to get moving. Print with the answer. No sign-up.
Medium Nurikabe
Free printable medium Nurikabe puzzles with answers. A nine by nine board where the two-by-two rule starts doing the work.
Hard Nurikabe
Free printable hard Nurikabe puzzles with answers. A ten by ten board with islands up to seven squares, where you have to ask what each number can still reach.
Expert Nurikabe
Free printable expert Nurikabe puzzles with answers. An eleven by eleven board with islands up to nine squares. Still exactly one answer.
Evil Nurikabe
Free printable evil Nurikabe puzzles with answers. The biggest board we print, with islands up to twelve squares. Still exactly one answer.
By audience
Nurikabe asks for no arithmetic at all, which makes it an unusually easy puzzle to hand to someone who says they are not a numbers person.
Nurikabe for beginners
Free printable Nurikabe puzzles for beginners with answers. Learn the three moves on a small board, with the answer on page two.
Nurikabe island puzzles
Free printable island-and-sea logic puzzles with answers. Every number is an island; shade the water around them.
Large print Nurikabe
Free printable large print Nurikabe puzzles with answers. A small board printed big, for easy reading. No sign-up.
One shading, every time
This is the guarantee that takes real work here. Most boards you can draw are not pinned by their own numbers, so the generator does not try to design one: it carves a board out of a connected sea, tries the numbers in a dozen different places on it, and keeps only a board a solver proves shades exactly one way. At the top grade it grows about thirty boards for every puzzle it keeps. Every puzzle here is checked by the same solver our Publisher Studio uses. The answer prints at the back.
How to solve a nurikabe
Every number on the grid is an island of that many unshaded squares. Shade everything that is not an island, so that no two islands touch side by side, the shaded sea is all one piece, and no two-by-two block anywhere is entirely shaded.
The method
- 1Ring the ones first. A number 1 is an island all by itself, so every square touching it is sea. That is free, it costs nothing to check, and on most boards it opens two or three corners at once.
- 2Shade between two numbers. Any square that touches two different numbers must be sea. Shading it would join them into one island, and an island is allowed only one number. This is the rule that fills in most of the middle of a board.
- 3Use the two-by-two rule in reverse. Whenever three squares of a two-by-two block are shaded, the fourth cannot be, so it belongs to some island. Finding which island it belongs to is usually the next step, and often the only one available.
- 4Ask what each number can still reach. A number of four can only ever use squares within three steps of itself, walking over squares that are not already sea or another island. A square no number on the board can reach is sea, however the rest of the puzzle turns out.
- 5Close an island as soon as it is full. When an island has as many squares as its number, it is finished, so every square around it is sea. Mark those straight away: the sea they add usually triggers the two-by-two rule somewhere else.
- The one rule people forget
- The sea has to be a single connected region. It is easy to finish a board where every island is the right size and two pools of sea never meet, and that board is wrong. Check it at the end by tracing from any shaded square.
- What the answer page shows
- The same grid with every sea square shaded, so the islands stand out as the white shapes between them.
- How the grades differ
- A bigger board, and a larger cap on how big one island may get. A board of threes and fours is read almost by inspection; an island of nine or ten has a shape to work out, and that is where the time goes.
- Is it the same as hitori?
- No. Both shade squares and both keep the unshaded squares connected, but in hitori you shade duplicates and shaded squares may never touch, while here the shaded squares are meant to be one region and the numbers give island sizes.
- Good for
- Anyone who likes a puzzle that turns into a picture as it closes.
Make one now
Pick a board, then print the puzzle and its answer. No sign-up, no watermark.