How to play tents puzzle
- Read the trees and numbers. Trees sit on the wooden board; numbers on each row and column say how many tents belong there. This page ships 16 hand-checked levels from 5×5 to 8×8 (91 tents across all boards).
- Tap to place tents or grass. Tap an empty cell to pitch a tent, tap again to mark grass (no tent), tap once more to clear. Trees stay locked.
- Satisfy the matching rules. Every tree must touch exactly one tent on an edge (up/down/left/right). Every tent must touch exactly one tree the same way. Tents may not share an edge with each other — diagonal corners are allowed (common online rule; FAQ notes this).
- Use Undo, Reset or Hint. Undo reverses the last mark. Reset clears your entries. Hint places one forced tent or grass — or a cell from the unique solution. Games that used Hint do not update your best.
Tents puzzle strategy
- Start with 0-clue rows and columns — mark every empty cell there as grass so tents cannot sneak in.
- A tree with only one open orthogonal neighbour must claim that cell as its tent.
- When a row’s remaining empty cells equal the tents still needed, those cells are all tents (if adjacency allows).
- After placing a tent, mark its other orthogonal empty neighbours as grass if they would break the one-tree / one-tent pairing or share an edge with that tent.
- Hint always agrees with the unique solution, so following it finishes a solvable board.
Why every level is uniquely solvable
We build a full legal camp (perfect tree↔tent matching, no orthogonal tent pairs, consistent counts), keep the trees and edge numbers as the puzzle, and accept the board only while a backtracking solver still finds exactly one completion. Unit tests rerun that uniqueness check on every ship.
Hint prefers forced tents or grass from those rules; if several options remain, it reads the stored unique solution — never a second conflicting layout.
More logic puzzles
Like grid logic? Try star battle, binary puzzle, Lights Out, Fillomino, LITS or ball sort. Chinese speakers can play the 帐篷谜题 version of this page with the same saved progress.