Shikaku
Hard
00:00
Classic
Hard Shikaku — what to expect
Hard is medium’s 8×8 board asking the same question far more often. Where a medium board makes you hunt for a cell only one clue can reach every so often, a hard board asks for it across roughly a third of the solve rather than a sixth. The board has not grown and no new step appears — you simply spend much more of the solve reading cells instead of clues.
How to play Shikaku
- Divide the whole grid into rectangles. Every square ends up inside exactly one of them.
- Each rectangle contains exactly one number.
- That number is the rectangle’s AREA — how many squares it covers. A 6 can be 1×6, 6×1, 2×3 or 3×2, and nothing else.
- So a 1 is its own square, and a prime number can only be a single strip.
- Start where there is no choice: a number whose rectangle fits only one way, usually against an edge or a corner.
- Two numbers can never share a rectangle, which rules out a great many shapes before you try them.
- Every puzzle has one solution, reachable by logic alone, and every board has a move you can make from the empty grid.