How to play Sunspot Cats
Every cat wants its own patch of sun. The board is a floor plan split into coloured rooms, and your job is to find a spot for one cat in every row, every column and every room. Cats are particular about their space, so no two may touch, not even at the corners.
Tap a square once to rule it out, tap it again to place a cat, and tap once more to clear it. Drag across squares to rule out several at once. Once a cat is down, the squares it blocks fade so you can see what is left. If two cats clash, they sit up and glare at each other until you move one, and there are no lives to lose.
A free game like Meowdoku
If you came here looking for a Meowdoku style puzzle to play in a browser, this is the same kind of logic puzzle: one per row, column and coloured region, with no touching. Sunspot Cats is our own game, with its own art and levels. It is not made by or connected with Oakever Games, who make the Meowdoku app. The two also play differently: here you have no hearts and no ads inside the game, nothing to download, and you can make as many mistakes as you like. To learn more about the original app, read our [Meowdoku guide](/trending/meowdoku).
The puzzle type itself is much older than any of these apps. It is known as Star Battle, and the same rules appear in LinkedIn's Queens.
60 levels and a daily puzzle
The levels run from 5×5 boards, which take a minute or two, to 9×9 boards that need real thought. Every level has exactly one answer, and we check by program that each can be solved by logic alone, so you never have to guess.
Today's puzzle is the same for everyone on a given day. When you finish it, you can share your time and paw score, which gives nothing away. You earn three paws with no hints, two with one or two hints, and one with more.
Tips for solving
Start with the smallest room. A room of two or three squares has few options, and often every option blocks the same square somewhere else, so you can rule that square out.
Look for rooms packed into a line. If a room sits entirely inside one row, its cat must be in that row, so every other square in that row is out. The same works for two rooms inside two rows.
Test a square in your head. Picture a cat there. If it would leave a neighbouring room or a row with nowhere to go, that square can be ruled out.
Mark more, guess less. Most of the work in a hard puzzle is ruling squares out. The cats tend to place themselves near the end.
Use a hint to learn. A hint never just hands you the answer. It makes one logical step and says why, using the same reasoning we use to check the levels.
