Cagey

Cagey is a cage puzzle stripped back to its arithmetic. The board is four cells by four, carved into bold-outlined cages, each cage carrying a target printed in its corner, and you fill it using only the digits 1 to 4. What makes it its own thing is the difficulty ladder. On Easy, the rule line under the keypad says outright that there are no row or column rules, just arithmetic, and the game's own description promises that the KenKen-style uniqueness rules, along with the other three operators, arrive at the higher levels.

1. Choose a track at the top of the page. Classic is open; the Challenge tab next to it carries a padlock.
2. Pick from the row underneath. Daily sits at the head of it with a flame, and Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert follow. Daily was lit at the same time as Easy, so the day's puzzle and the difficulty are two separate choices.
3. Tap a cell on the grid. It tints pale blue to mark the one you are filling.
4. Punch in a digit from the 1 to 4 keypad on the right, or clear the cell with the backspace key.
5. Fill every cage so its cells reach the target in its corner. Undo walks back a move, and the hint button carries its remaining count in the label.

Most cage puzzles hand you the full KenKen rulebook on day one and let you drown in it. Cagey splits the rulebook up: at Easy the row and column constraints are switched off entirely and a cage is just a small sum, then the harder rungs bolt the uniqueness rules back on. With digits capped at 4 on a four by four board, that leaves something small enough to hold in your head, with a ladder underneath for when the arithmetic stops resisting.

Quiet. Tapping a cell only tinted it pale blue to show the selection, and no colour appeared on the grid to grade anything. What does move while you think is the clock at the top of the page, which starts before you touch the board, and the rule line under the keypad, which restates the constraint that is actually live at the difficulty you picked. That line is the real feedback surface here: it states the constraint that is live at the level you picked, so it is the thing to read before you commit to a strategy.

Classic

The open track, selected by default when the board loads.

Challenge

A second track sitting beside Classic, its label carrying a padlock.

Daily

A chip at the head of the difficulty row, marked with a flame, lit alongside a difficulty rather than instead of one.

Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert

Four rungs of difficulty. At Easy the board's rule line rules out any row or column constraint; the game's description says uniqueness comes in higher up.

• Read the rule line under the keypad before you start. At Easy it tells you row and column uniqueness is not in play, which makes each cage a self-contained sum that nothing outside it can contradict.
• Hunt for the cages whose target sits near the edge of what digits capped at 4 can produce. Those have a single decomposition, and they are the anchors everything else hangs off.
• The hint button shows how many hints are left in its own label, so you can see the cost before you spend one.