Sudoku and Heyawake are both grid-based logic puzzles you solve by pure deduction, so solvers naturally wonder how alike they really are. The short answer: Heyawake is distant to Sudoku. Below we lay out what the two share, where they part ways, and whether the skills you have built on Sudoku will carry over.
- Grid: Rooms grid
- Closeness to Sudoku: Distant
- Also called: Divided Rooms
What is Heyawake?
Shade cells so numbered rooms hold exactly that many shaded cells, shaded cells never touch, and no white line crosses more than one room border. Here are the rules in full:
- A numbered room must contain exactly that many shaded cells; unnumbered rooms are free.
- Shaded cells never touch orthogonally, and all unshaded cells stay connected.
- No straight run of unshaded cells may pass through more than two rooms.
What a Heyawake looks like
Heyawake shades cells so a numbered room holds exactly that many shaded cells, shaded cells never touch, unshaded cells stay connected, and no straight unshaded run crosses more than two rooms. Here is a small solved grid with two rooms (colours) and their shaded cells.
Two rooms (purple, green); the "1" rooms each hold exactly one shaded cell (dark).
Rooms with a fixed count echo Sudoku's regions and their quotas, and it is a pure-logic, single-solution puzzle. But you shade cells rather than place digits, and the connectivity and line-spanning rules are unlike anything in Sudoku — a distant relative.
What Heyawake shares with Sudoku
- Rooms with a fixed count echo Sudoku's regions and their quotas.
- It is a pure-logic, single-solution puzzle solved by elimination.
How Heyawake differs from Sudoku
- You shade cells rather than place digits.
- The connectivity and line-spanning rules are unlike anything in Sudoku.
Do Sudoku skills transfer?
The tools differ, but "this room needs two shaded and only two cells qualify" is the same forced-count logic as a Sudoku single.
The verdict
Heyawake shares Sudoku's region-quota thinking on a shaded board rather than a numbered one.