Brain Training⭐⭐
Sudoku Classic
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Mosaic Puzzles
About Mosaic Puzzles
Create pictures from colored tiles. This free online game is part of our brain training collection and is designed for players of all ages.
- Difficulty: easy
- Average play time: 12 minutes
- No download or signup required
- Works on desktop and mobile devices
How to Play Mosaic Puzzles
Fill cells so each numbered cell has exactly that many filled neighbours (including itself). An empty mosaic cell has 0 filled neighbours.
Tip: Work outward from cells where the count matches all adjacent cells.
💡 Mosaic Puzzle Strategy
- Start at the zeros. A cell marked 0 means it and all its neighbours stay empty — that is free information across up to nine cells.
- Look for the maximums. A 9 in the middle of the grid fills its entire 3×3 neighbourhood; a 4 in a corner does the same for its smaller one.
- Remember that corners and edges have fewer neighbours. A corner cell touches only four cells including itself, so its clue is far more constraining than the same number would be centrally.
- A cell counts itself. This trips up nearly everyone on their first puzzle and makes every clue read one too high.
🧠 What Mosaic Puzzles Build
Mosaic puzzles are constraint satisfaction on a neighbourhood rather than a line, which makes them a genuinely different shape of problem from Sudoku or nonograms. Because each clue describes a small local region, progress comes from stitching overlapping local certainties together into a global picture. They are gentler than they look once the self-counting rule is internalised.