Play Tapa Online
Shade cells to build a single connected wall. Clue numbers show the lengths of consecutive shaded groups around each clue. No 2×2 shaded blocks allowed!
Created by Brian Hamilton
Tap a cell to shade it (wall) — tap again to clear
How to play Tapa
Shade cells to build one connected wall, guided by the numbers.
- A number describes the eight cells around it: each number is the length of one unbroken run of shaded cells going round the ring. Several numbers mean several separate runs, in any order.
- All shaded cells must form one connected group, joined edge to edge.
- No 2×2 block may be entirely shaded.
- Cells with numbers are never shaded.
- Every puzzle has exactly one solution.
Controls: tap a cell to shade it, tap again to clear it. Use Check to test your work and Solution to reveal the answer.
A clue counts runs, not neighbours
Every number in Tapa describes the eight cells around it. But it does not say how many of them are shaded — it says how those shaded cells are grouped as you travel round the ring. A 3 means one unbroken run of three. Three shaded neighbours scattered apart would read 1 1 1, which is a different clue entirely.
The numbers in a multi-part clue are given in no particular order — 1 2 and 2 1 mean the same thing. What matters is that the runs are separate, with at least one unshaded cell between them.
The two clues that solve themselves
0 is the best square on the board. None of its eight neighbours is shaded, so eight cells resolve at once with no reasoning at all. They are common: 20% of all clues are 0, and 81% of boards carry at least one.
8 is its mirror — every neighbour shaded, one unbroken ring — and almost as common at 14% of clues. Between them, a third of the numbers on a typical board are settled the moment you read them.
| Clue | 0 | 8 | 1 | 7 | 5 | 2 | 1 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share of clues | 21% | 14% | 9% | 9% | 9% | 8% | 4% |
Where a clue sits changes what it means
This is the deduction most solvers miss. A clue in the middle of the grid has eight neighbours, but one against an edge has only five, and one in a corner has only three. The same number is far more constraining out there, and 34% of clues sit on an edge or corner.
A 3 in a corner is not a hint, it is an answer: the corner has exactly three neighbours, so all three are shaded. A 5 on an edge does the same thing. And an 8 can only ever appear away from the border, because nowhere else has eight neighbours to shade.
So read the edges first. The same number that would be nearly useless in the middle can be fully determined against a wall, and the border is where a Tapa grid cracks open.
A worked board
Where solvers get stuck
Reading a clue as a count. A 4 is one run of four, not four shaded neighbours arranged however you like. If your four cells are split, the clue you have satisfied is 1 3 or 2 2, and the board will not close.
Forgetting the wall is one piece. Roughly half the grid ends up shaded, and all of it must connect. A region that satisfies every nearby number and cannot reach the rest of the wall is wrong, however tidy it looks.
Filling a 2×2. No four cells in a square may all be shaded. With half the board shaded this bites constantly, and it is the rule that turns a plausible-looking thick wall into a thin winding one.
Shading a clue cell. Numbers are never part of the wall. They are holes in it, which is what forces the wall to bend around them.
Two things you can check about these puzzles
Every puzzle has exactly one solution. This was not true before. Clues were placed on a fixed share of cells — 55% on Easy, 40% on Medium, 28% on Hard — chosen by a score that favoured interesting-looking numbers, with nothing checking the result. Measured against an exhaustive counter, 0 of 35 boards had a single solution, while the page promised one "reachable through pure logical deduction" in three separate places.
The walls themselves were never the problem. Clued at every cell, 40 of 40 boards were already unique — so the fix was to start from every clue and take them away one at a time, keeping a removal only while exactly one solution survived. Difficulty is how far that goes. 64 boards across all five sizes were then re-checked against a separate counter written from the rules alone; all 64 were unique.
All five grid sizes survived. Several puzzles on this site lost their largest boards when the uniqueness checks went in, because proving a board unique turned out to cost more than generating one. Tapa did not: even a 14×14 lands in a few seconds, so 7×7 through 14×14 all remain.
Tapa and its neighbours
Tapa is a modern puzzle — Serkan Yürekli's, from 2007 — and the name is Turkish for a stopper or lid. It shares the shade-a-connected-wall frame with Nurikabe and Heyawake, but its clues work differently from either.
Those puzzles count cells in a region. Tapa counts shapes in a ring, which is why one cell can carry several numbers at once and why the same clue means different things in the middle of the board and against its edge.
More shading puzzles
If you like deciding which cells to fill in, try these: