How to Play Meowdoku: Cat Sudoku Rules and Controls

Meowdoku is a logic puzzle in the sudoku family, played on a grid of coloured regions. You place one cat in every row, one cat in every column and one cat inside each coloured area, then check that no two cats are touching. Those four conditions are the whole game.

Board size changes from puzzle to puzzle. The built-in set opens at 4×4 and runs up to 9×9, so the smallest board needs four cats and the largest needs nine. The number of cats always matches the number of rows, the number of columns and the number of coloured regions, and that balance is what lets every board be solved by logic alone.

Beside a classic 9×9 sudoku, a Meowdoku board looks almost bare: nine cats against eighty-one digits. The lighter board is not the easier one. Because the four conditions lean on each other, a single placement can settle several regions at once, and that is where the puzzle's difficulty actually lives.

The condition that separates Meowdoku from an ordinary latin square is adjacency. Two cats may not sit in cells that touch, and touching counts diagonally as well as side by side. A cat rules out all eight cells around it, not just the four that share an edge.

This changes how you scan the grid. In classic sudoku you strike a digit out of the same row, column and box. Here, a cat in one corner of a region can eliminate candidates in a region that shares neither its row nor its column, simply because those cells sit on its diagonal.

Beginners forget the diagonals first, and it is the costliest habit in the game. A placement can satisfy its row, its column and its colour and still be wrong, because a cat two cells away touches it at the corner.

Every cell belongs to exactly one coloured region, and the regions are the part of a Meowdoku board that sudoku players have not met before. A region can take almost any shape: a full column, a stepped L, a cluster tucked into a corner. The shape does not matter. What matters is that each region, however it is drawn, finishes with exactly one cat.

Regions are also the easiest place to begin, because there are few of them to hold in your head. A region of two or three cells offers a cat very few legal homes, and a region jammed into a corner is often forced on the spot. Rows and columns are long and open; regions are short and tight.

If a fresh board leaves you staring, pick the smallest region rather than the busiest row and start there. It is a small habit, and it saves more time than it looks like it should.

The opening puzzle is a 4×4 split into four regions, so it needs four cats. Boards this small are usually finished by counting rather than by clever deduction, which is exactly what makes one a good introduction.

Take whichever region sits in a corner. Its cat has only a handful of legal cells, and each one you rule out narrows the neighbouring regions in turn. Working a single region at a time, marking an X on every cell you dismiss, you will normally reach a forced placement before any real thinking is required. From there the board tends to move by itself: one region settles a cell, that cell constrains a neighbour, and the neighbour constrains the next line along. The pace stays deliberately gentle at 4×4, which lets you learn the rules without also fighting the size.

If the board stalls, the How to play dialog lists a hint written for that specific level, and the walkthrough guide breaks the same puzzle into numbered steps with a video answer. Reading the solution to Level 1 once is a quick way to see the pattern that the counting is aiming at.

The built-in set is grouped into four bands: intro, easy, medium and hard. What changes across them is not the rules but the amount of help the board offers. Intro puzzles are small and open enough that counting settles them; hard puzzles hide their forced moves behind several rounds of elimination.

Grid size is the most visible lever. A 4×4 has four cells per row and four regions, while a 9×9 has nine of each, so every placement touches far more of the board and a wrong move has more places to hide.

When the built-in levels run out, the daily puzzle keeps the habit going with a fresh board for each date. Your progress through the built-in set is stored in the browser, so you can close the tab and come back to the same unfinished grid.