How to Play Meowdoku?

Meowdoku looks like a cat-themed mobile game and plays like a logic puzzle in the Queens family. You do not need to know that family to play it, though. You need three rules, and they fit in a sentence each.

Rule one: the board is divided into coloured regions, and each region holds exactly one cat. Regions are not neat rectangles. They bend, they wrap around other regions, and on harder boards they can look almost arbitrary. What matters is that every region, however odd its shape, ends the board with exactly one cat in it.

Rule two: no two cats may share a row or a column. This is the Sudoku-like constraint, and it is what stops the puzzle from being a simple one-per-region exercise. If a cat is in row four, row four is finished - no other cat can go there, no matter which region it belongs to. The same goes for the column.

Rule three: cats cannot touch each other, not even diagonally. This is the rule people forget, and it is the one that does the most work. A placed cat eliminates the eight squares surrounding it in addition to its row, column and region. On dense boards that halo is often what finally forces the next placement.

Putting a cat down is a two-step gesture: double-tap a square to place it. You also have an X marker, and it is not decoration. Marking a square with an X records a deduction - 'no cat can go here' - and a good Meowdoku solve is mostly X marks with a few cats scattered through them. Beginners tap cats. Good players mark Xs.

You get three hearts, and a wrong cat costs one. That is the game's way of telling you it is not a guessing game: every board has a deduction path, so a guess is a shortcut you did not need. If you find yourself wanting to guess, that is the signal to slow down and look for a forced move instead.

So what does a first board look like? Start by scanning for a region with only one usable square, or a region whose squares all sit inside a single row or column. Those are free cats. Place one, then immediately mark the Xs it creates - its row, its column, the rest of its region, and all eight neighbouring squares. Very often that cleanup alone reveals the next forced cat, and the board starts to unspool.

If nothing is forced, do not guess and do not stare. Look for a region that has been squeezed down to two or three candidates, or a row whose remaining candidates all belong to one region. Those two patterns solve the large majority of beginner and intermediate boards, and they are the foundation everything harder is built on.

One last piece of advice that sounds like a joke but is not: the timer is not your enemy, because there is no timer. Meowdoku has no move limit and no clock. The only resource you are spending is patience, and the only thing that ends a board early is an unjustified tap.