Range Shading Puzzle Unblocked

Range Shading Puzzle is all about sight lines. Numbers sit on a white grid, and you decide which of the blank squares turn black. Each number acts like a lookout tower: it sees along its row and column until something black blocks the view, and the number of white squares it sees must match its value exactly. You can play it unblocked right here. Jonas Kölker wrote it as Range for Simon Tatham’s puzzle collection, and Japanese puzzle fans know the same idea as Kurodoko.

Four Rules That Work Together

Every finished board obeys all of these at once:

1. Numbered squares always stay white.
2. Black squares never share a side, although two may touch at a corner.
3. The white squares form one connected area, linked through shared sides.
4. Each number equals the count of white squares visible from it in the four straight directions, including the number’s own square.

Take a 3 in the middle of an open row. It counts itself, so it sees only two more squares in total. If its row and column currently show seven white squares, black squares have to go somewhere along those lines to cut the view down.

Shade with a left-click and drop a dot with a right-click. A dot is just your note that a square stays white. Clicking repeatedly cycles through black, dot and empty, and the grid flashes once everything checks out.

Range Shading Puzzle controls

To do this	Keyboard	Mouse	Touch
Paint a square black (press again to cycle)	Move with the arrows, then Enter	Left-click	Tap while the Tap switch is on Shade black
Dot a square you know is white (press again to cycle)	Space	Right-click	Press and hold, or flip Tap to Dot and tap
Leave dots along a path	Shift + arrows	—	—
New puzzle, undo, redo	N, U, R	Buttons above the grid	Buttons above the grid

Solving Range, Step by Step

Here is a rough order that works on most boards.

Step one: find the limits. For each number, count the most it could possibly see if nothing were black. If that maximum already equals the clue, every square in its lines is white. Dot them.

Step two: squeeze the small clues. A 2 can see itself and one neighbour, nothing more. Three of its four sides must therefore be black or the board edge, and on a corner the answer is often immediate.

Step three: surround each black square. Black squares can’t touch, so the moment you shade one, its four neighbours are white. This single habit creates a lot of new information.

Step four: guard the connection. Before shading near a corner or along the edge, check that you aren’t sealing off a pocket of white. Any black square that splits the white area is wrong, no matter what the numbers say.

Step five: think about shared lines. One black square on a row can shorten the view of two numbers at once. Look for spots where shading helps both.

Shift with the arrow keys drops a line of dots as you move, which is handy once you have proved a whole stretch is white.

Why Range Is Worth a Try

Range sits nicely between number puzzles and shading puzzles. You do some counting, but most of the work is spatial: keeping the white region joined while the numbers pull it apart. Presets run from 9 by 6 up to 16 by 11, and you can set custom widths and heights as well. Preferences even let you swap the mouse buttons.

If you like black-and-white logic, Unruly Black and White is a fun contrast built on balance rather than sight lines. More grid challenges are waiting in our puzzle games section.