Guide
How to Play Hitori
Three rules, a worked example, and the techniques that solve every board without guessing.
How to Play
- 1.
Shade cells so that no number appears more than once among the unshaded cells of any row or column — duplicates are fine among shaded cells.
- 2.
Shaded cells may never touch horizontally or vertically. Diagonal contact is allowed.
- 3.
All unshaded cells must remain connected as a single region — a shade that walls off part of the board is illegal.
- 4.
The board is solved when all three rules hold at once. Every puzzle has exactly one solution, and you can always reach it by logic alone.
FAQ
Hitori is a Japanese logic puzzle published by Nikoli in 1990. You shade cells in a numbered grid so that no number repeats among unshaded cells in any row or column, no two shaded cells touch side-by-side, and all unshaded cells stay connected as one region. The name comes from 'Hitori ni shite kure' — roughly, 'leave me alone.'
Three rules: (1) no number may appear more than once among the unshaded cells of any row or column; (2) shaded cells may never be horizontally or vertically adjacent, though diagonal contact is fine; (3) the unshaded cells must form a single connected region. Solve all three at once and the board is done.
Not here. Every puzzle on Play Hitori is machine-verified to have exactly one solution reachable by step-by-step deduction, and boards that would require trial-and-error are discarded at generation. If you are stuck, there is always a provable next move — usually a sandwich, triple, pair, or connectivity argument.
A new 5×5 board is published every day at midnight US Eastern, and every player worldwide gets the same one. Solving it on the day extends your streak; every past daily stays playable at its own permanent URL in the archive.
A circle is a pencil mark meaning 'this cell is proven white.' Tapping a cell cycles it: shaded, then circled, then back to normal. When you shade a cell, its four neighbors are auto-circled (you can toggle this off), because the no-adjacent-shading rule guarantees they stay white.
Five sizes — 5×5, 7×7, 9×9, 12×12, and 15×15 — each in easy, medium, and hard. Difficulty is graded by the techniques a board actually requires: easy boards fall to the starter patterns, medium boards add corner patterns and double-pairs, and hard boards demand connectivity arguments.
Yes — Singles is the name Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection uses for the identical genre. Same three rules, same logic. If you know Singles, you already know Hitori.
Completely. Every puzzle works in any modern browser on phone, tablet, or desktop — no account, no downloads, no paywall. Progress, streaks, and best times are stored on your device.