Unruly
Fill every square with a purple square or a yellow disc so that:
- no three consecutive squares, horizontally or vertically, hold
the same piece
- each row and column contains the same number of each.
Given pieces sit on a lighter square and cannot be changed.
One setting adds a rule, and a board’s name in the Type menu says when
it is on:
- Unique: no two rows may be the same, and no two columns.
Controls
On a touch screen, a tap does what a click does, and a long press what a right-click does (more ways to right-click).
Click a square to turn it purple. Right-click it to turn it yellow. Keep the button down and drag to do the same to every square you pass over that looked the same as the first.
With the keyboard, the arrow keys move a cursor around the board. Enter does what a click does to the square under it, and Space what a right-click does. Press Backspace or Delete to empty the square under the cursor; clicking it round gets there too.
Clicking a filled square again moves it on round purple, yellow and
empty, and a right-click goes round the other way. You can also press 1 for
purple, and 0 or 2 for yellow.
Hints
Hint explains the next step rather than simply making it. It reasons
only from the squares already filled, so it carries on from wherever you
are, as long as none of them is wrong; if one is, it asks you to fix the
highlighted mistakes first.
- A ring marks the square to color. It is drawn empty: the sentence says whether it must be purple or yellow.
- An outline marks the squares whose colors the step reasons from: the pair that would make three, the full quota, the only places the last one can go, or the row a match would copy.
- Stripes mark the row or column the sentence calls “this row” or “this column”.
The hint uses four ideas:
- No three in a row. Where two of three squares in a line already hold
the same piece, the third must hold the other one.
- A full quota. A row or column that already holds all its purple
pieces must be yellow everywhere else, and the other way round.
- The last one has few places to go. When a row or column needs just
one more of a color, and every place but the outlined squares would force
three of the other color together, the rest of the line is the other
color.
- No two lines alike, when Unique rows and columns is switched on
in ‘Custom type…’. When the outlined row already holds all its purple
pieces, and the striped row holds all but one of its own in the same places,
putting the last one where the outlined row has its remaining purple
would make the two rows identical, so that square must be yellow (and
the same with the colors swapped, or with columns).
When one idea settles several squares at once, the hint walks through
them one at a time as a single step.
Unruly parameters
These parameters are available from the ‘Custom type…’ option on the ‘Type’ menu.
- Width, Height
- Size of the grid in squares. Both must be even. Each must be at least 6.
- Difficulty
- Determine the difficulty of the generated puzzle; see what the names mean.
- Unique rows and columns
- When on, no two rows may be the same, and no two columns. There are only so many different rows of a given width, so this limits how tall the grid can be for its width, and the other way round: a grid 6 squares wide can be at most 14 high, and one 8 wide at most 34.
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