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★ 5.00 average from 1 plays
LionBlock is a number puzzle that looks like a colouring book and behaves like arithmetic. The board is a grid with numbers scattered across it, and each number is a promise: somewhere on this board there is exactly one rectangle containing that many cells, and this number sits inside it.
Your job is to find all of them. Every rectangle must hold exactly as many cells as its clue says, no two rectangles may overlap, and when you are done not one square of the board is left uncovered. Those three rules are the whole game, and between them they usually leave exactly one solution.
Puzzle solvers will recognise the form — it is the genre usually called Shikaku, and like every good puzzle of that family it is solved by elimination rather than by trying things. There is no timer pressing on you and nothing to react to. A board either works out or it does not, and finding out which is the point.
A clue of 5, 7, 11 or 13 can only ever be a single row or a single column, because those numbers have no other factors. That usually leaves one or two placements on a real board, and each one you fix constrains everything around it.
A clue near an edge loses half its possible rectangles immediately, and one tucked into a corner loses most of them. Working inwards from the outside is almost always faster than starting in the middle where every direction is still open.
If a cell can be covered by exactly one rectangle from exactly one clue, that rectangle is forced whether it looks likely or not. Hunting for those cells is the technique that unlocks boards where nothing else seems certain.
Every cell gets covered exactly once, so the clues on a solved board sum to the number of cells in the grid. If your totals do not match, you have misread a clue — and that is much easier to find now than twenty rectangles later.
No. Rectangles never overlap, and every cell on the board ends up inside exactly one of them — that is what makes the solution unique.
Yes. Each clue belongs to one rectangle and each rectangle contains one clue, so a rectangle with no number in it is always wrong.
Any rectangle whose area matches its clue, including a single line of cells. A clue of 4 can be 1×4, 2×2 or 4×1, whichever fits without overlapping anything else.
It is a logic puzzle rather than a reaction game — the board is not going anywhere, and nothing is lost by sitting and staring at it for a while.
