Hitori (PuzzleMadness)

Hitori starts with a grid full of numbers, many of them repeated. You turn squares black until no row or column shows the same number twice among its white squares. Black squares may never sit side by side (touching at corners is allowed), and all the white squares must form one connected area.

The daily page opens today's puzzle on its own, and its title carries the date (on 3 October 2026 it read "Daily Medium Hitori Puzzle for Saturday 3rd October 2026"). There is a separate dated puzzle for each size: Small, Medium and Large, and the Mixed page serves a fourth grid of its own. Past days stay in the archive, so a missed puzzle can be played later, and there is a print version and an image download of the grid. PuzzleMadness does not publish solutions: the site tells you when you have finished a grid correctly or made a mistake. Each completed puzzle adds to your total on the Hitori monthly and all-time leaderboards, where only your best score on any one puzzle counts.

A few patterns open most grids. In a run of three equal numbers the middle one stays white, and a square sitting between two equal numbers stays white too. Once a square is black, its neighbours are white, and a white number forces its twins in the same row and column to be black. The connectivity rule settles the last choices.

PuzzleMadness is a British puzzle site with dozens of daily puzzle types in the browser, from many sudoku variants to logic grids such as Nurikabe, Hashi and Slitherlink. It is free to play and carries ads. A free account keeps track of the puzzles you have finished and puts your name on the leaderboards, and the badges next to usernames mark how many puzzles a player has completed.