Nurikabe Puzzle Guide | Easy Classic Logic Rules

Nurikabe is a classical puzzle and has appeared in many World Puzzle Championships. The Nurikabe puzzle nowadays is part of almost every puzzle contest. This is an easy puzzle and can be used to understand the rules of the Nurikabe puzzle type. Nurikabe puzzle is published daily as part of the Conceptis Puzzles. If you like this puzzle, you can solve a new puzzle every day. If you want to learn the techniques to solve the Nurikabe puzzle, you can watch the Nurikabe puzzle tutorial by Conceptis Puzzles.

The Rules of the Nurikabe Puzzle

You have a grid of squares. Some cells of the grid start containing numbers. The goal is to determine whether each of the cells of the grid is "black" or "white" (Islands in the Stream calls these "water" and "land" respectively). The black cells form "the nurikabe" (Islands in the Stream calls it "the stream"): they must all be orthogonally contiguous (form a single polyomino), number-free, and contain no 2x2 or larger solid rectangles (Islands in the Stream calls such illegal blocks "pools"). The white cells form "islands" (which is where Islands in the Stream got its name): each number n must be part of an n-omino composed only of white cells. All white cells must belong to exactly one island; islands must have exactly one numbered cell. Solvers will typically shade in cells they have deduced to be black and dot (non-numbered) cells deduced to be white.