Shinro Garden

About Shinro Garden

Shinro Garden puts the Shinro puzzle, a logic grid also known as a hidden-object deduction puzzle, into a small garden. The board is 8 by 8. Twelve flowers are hidden in it, a number beside each row and above each column says how many flowers that line holds, and some squares are wooden arrow tiles. Every arrow points in a straight line, across or diagonally, toward at least one flower.

The daily puzzle is built from the date, so everyone who plays on the same day gets the same garden. Difficulty follows the week: Monday to Thursday are easy, Friday and Saturday are medium and Sunday is hard. The date and difficulty are shown under the title.

There are two modes, Soil and Plant. Soil marks a square that cannot hold a flower; Plant puts a flower down. You can drag to mark several squares as soil at once, hold a square to plant on it, or hold Shift on a keyboard to switch modes for a moment. The game is strict: planting where nothing grows, or burying a real flower under soil, ends the game at once and shows the solution. A finished garden shows your completion time.

After the daily game you can copy a short result to share, with the date, the difficulty and your time or how many flowers you found. Free Play then offers unlimited extra gardens at easy, medium or hard. It suits players who like Star Battle, Queens or Minesweeper style deduction and want a short puzzle where every move has to be certain.

How to play Shinro Garden

1. Open the game; today's garden loads with its date and difficulty under the title.
2. Read the counts: the number beside each row and above each column is how many of the 12 flowers that line holds.
3. Use the arrow tiles: each arrow points in a straight line at one or more flowers somewhere in that direction.
4. In Soil mode, tap or drag across squares that cannot hold a flower, such as every square in a row or column with a count of 0.
5. Switch to Plant mode, or hold a square, to plant a flower where the clues leave only one place for it.
6. Keep going until all 12 flowers are planted; one wrong plant or one buried flower ends the game, so only move when you are sure.
7. Press Share to copy your result, or pick Easy, Medium or Hard under Free Play for another garden.

Tips

• Start with rows and columns marked 0 and fill them with soil; it clears a lot of the board at once.
• An arrow pointing at the edge with only one open square left in its direction must have its flower there.
• Count the open squares in a line against its number: when they match, every open square there is a flower.
• Arrow tiles never hold flowers themselves, so leave them out when counting the squares left in a line.
• On a keyboard, hold Shift to switch modes for a single move instead of pressing the mode buttons.

Questions