Fillomino

Fillomino Instructions:
Here's how to play Fillomino:
You must enter a number of any value into each empty square in the puzzle grid. Each number must form part of a continuous region of squares of size specified by the number. Two different regions with the same number of squares cannot touch horizontally/vertically. Some regions may have no pre-printed numbers at all, while others may have multiple pre-printed numbers.

All About Fillomino

If fillomino is such a fun puzzle, then why is it not seen very often in print?

There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly it is time consuming to make, because a good fillomino puzzle is hand-made, and therefore they are hard to produce in large volumes.

Secondly, the solving logic required to solve can be tricky, subtle, difficult to spot, and generally quite difficult... a hard fillomino can be a lot tougher to crack than a hard sudoku puzzle for instance.

However, the puzzle has great depth, and one of the particularly interesting elements of the logic puzzle that is fillomino is that not every region needs to have one of its members stated in the starting grid.

This means that entire regions will be deduced by the solver whilst going along, and sometimes these can be really large regions - it is great fun to find these out when solving fillomino puzzles!

The most common starting point with solving fillominos is usually to look for any cells that have their value forced - for instance if there is a cell of a region trapped between other numbered cells, then the region must come out into one or more of the empty cells.

Interesting patterns of the same number can also be useful for making placements - one of the fun elements of fillomino can be working out whether instances of the same number must be members of the same region or infact must belong to different regions. Marking in the boundaries clearly as you go along is key to solving a good fillomino puzzle.

Because of the depth and many interesting rules there are to discover when playing fillomino, really the only way to do it justice and to get a feel for the puzzle is to try out some fillomino puzzles, so if the description of this lovely logic puzzle has intrigued you then do give the sample puzzle a go - it's at a small 5 x 5 grid size to hopefully not be too intimidating.

Every fillomino puzzle has one solution that can be reached through the use of logical rules, guessing is not required.

Related puzzles

Hashi, Hidoku, Kakuro, Nonogram

Last updated: 15 Feb 2012

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Sample puzzle:
start Fillomino image

Sample solution:
solution Fillomino image

View a sample Fillomino PDF

Play Fillomino Puzzles:

There is a selection of fillomino puzzles available to play online at the Fillomino Puzzles section of the Puzzle Club website.

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