Daily Tents and Trees

Tents and Trees is a classic from European puzzle magazines, and this is a clean daily version of it inside OIYO's arcade. Every tree on the board needs exactly one tent, pitched orthogonally beside it. Tents may never touch each other, not even at a corner. The numbers along the top and down the left say how many tents belong in that column or row. A five by five board, for instance, has the counts printed on two edges and the trees sitting on their own green cells, and the page is available in six languages.

1. Read the counts on the edges first. Each number is how many tents that row or column has to end up holding.
2. Click cells to pitch tents next to the trees. Each tree takes exactly one, directly above, below, left or right of it, never diagonally.
3. Keep tents apart from each other, including corner to corner.
4. Use Hint when you stall and Reset to wipe the board, and switch between the dated puzzle and free play with the toggle above the grid.

Tents and Trees is one of the great constraint puzzles because its three rules pull in different directions: the pairing is local, the edge counts are linear, and the no-touching rule is spatial. Satisfy one and you break another, until all three lock onto a single arrangement. This version does the thing that matters most in a daily, which is checking your work at the moment you place a tent and telling you which rule you tripped, and it parks a free-play board right beside the dated one so a bad day does not have to be the end of it.

Live and specific. Pitching tents that push a line past its count turns the offending cells pink and puts a line of text under the board saying that a row or column count was exceeded. So the board checks as you go rather than at the end, and it names which kind of rule you broke instead of just flashing at you. The trees keeping their own green cells is a small thing that pays off once half the board is marked, because the map stays readable.

Daily Puzzle

The dated board, reached from the calendar-marked button above the grid.

Free play 5x5

A generated board at a fixed size, sitting next to the daily as the other half of the same toggle.

• Start with the zeros. A row or column marked 0 takes no tents at all, which kills every candidate square in it at once and usually forces a nearby tree's tent to the far side.
• Work from the trees that have only one legal neighbour, then check that your placement has not stolen the only free neighbour of the tree next door. The page's own strategy note makes exactly that point.
• Once a line has all its tents, everything else in it is grass. Marking that out is how the chain of deductions keeps moving without a guess.
• The no-touching rule is about spacing, not pairing. Two tents cannot share a corner even when they belong to trees at opposite ends of the board.