Shading puzzles
Decide which cells are black and which stay white. The clues look different in each type, but the moves are the same: a shaded cell here forces a white cell there, and a picture or a wall slowly appears.
All shading puzzles
What makes a shading puzzle
In every puzzle on this page, the answer is a pattern of black and white cells. Nurikabe gives you numbers inside the grid and asks for a single connected wall around islands of exactly that size. Light Up hides bulbs in the white cells instead and lights the grid from them. Nonograms, Hitori and Heyawake, coming soon, use run lengths, repeated numbers and room counts to say what gets shaded.
Two habits carry across all of them: mark the cells you know stay white (a dot in Nurikabe, a × in Light Up) as eagerly as you shade the black ones, and look for the 2×2 rule, since almost every shading puzzle forbids a fully shaded square. Start with a 5×5 Light Up if you are new, then move to Nurikabe.
FAQ
A 5×5 Light Up. Its numbered black cells give explicit, local deductions. Nurikabe is the natural next step because it adds the connected-wall and 2×2 rules that most other types share.
In Nurikabe a dot marks a cell you know is white, part of an island. In Light Up a × marks a white cell that cannot hold a bulb. These marks matter as much as shading: many deductions come from what a cell cannot be.
No. Every grid here is verified to have a single solution reachable by logic. If you are stuck, use Check to confirm what you have so far is consistent.