Daily Akari

Daily Akari is one Light Up grid a day, the Nikoli puzzle type, redrawn as a cast of small black blocks with faces. You drop lights on the empty squares; each one shines outward along its row and column until a block stops the beam, and the day is finished when every square is lit and every numbered block has exactly the number of lights it asks for touching its sides. The constraint that turns this from decoration into deduction is that no light may stand on an already-lit square, so two lights can never see each other.

1. Tap an empty square to set a light down. It illuminates the whole row and column outward from there and stops at the first black block in each direction.
2. Read the blocks. A numbered block wants exactly that many lights on the squares directly touching it, no more and no fewer; unmarked blocks impose no count at all and only serve to break up beams.
3. Press and hold, or right-click, a square to stamp an ✗ on it, recording a square you have proved can never hold a light.

About five minutes on an easy grid and a good deal longer when the day is set harder, ending in a single unambiguous state: fully lit with every block smiling, or not finished. It suits people who want deduction with no vocabulary, no trivia and no answer to be spoiled - every step is derivable from the grid itself, and the archive runs back to January 2025 if one board a day is not enough. It suits nobody who plays daily games for the social column: there are no streaks, no leaderboards, no percentage of players who beat it, only your own clock and, optionally, your own accuracy. And the bigger boards, combined with a press-and-hold to place a cross, make it a fiddly thing to do properly on a phone.

Every light throws a bright cyan beam down its row and column that stops dead at the first block, so the lit region and the dark one separate instantly against the muted slate of the unlit squares. Blocks carry their requirement as stacked white dashes and swap it for a smile the moment they have the lights they want, which means you read progress off the faces rather than by recounting neighbours. Squares you have ruled out hold an ✗, and a setting clears those crosses once a beam reaches them so the board declutters as it fills. The result carries a solve time, plus an accuracy figure if Pro Mode is switched on, into a copyable share line.

Core play

Daily Akari offers a single default puzzle: one Light Up (Nikoli), grid each day. You solve that one daily board, placing lights until every square is lit and every numbered block has exactly the required adjacent lights; there are no alternate game modes.

• Open on the extreme counts rather than the middle ones. A block asking for none forbids a light on all four of its neighbours outright, and a block asking for four fills all four; both are certainties available before you have placed anything, and neither requires a guess.
• Spend the ✗ marks freely around a block that has just started smiling. A satisfied block can never take another light, so every free square still touching it is permanently dead, and crossing them off shrinks the search far faster than staring at the lit squares does.
• The pressure point in an Akari grid is the square only one line can ever reach, a corner pocket or the far end of a corridor. Since every square must end up lit, some square on that line has to hold a light, and that forced line is usually where a Hard board finally cracks.