Shoji Wall Rooms

Shoji Wall Rooms is a quiet Heyawake puzzle, drawn like a paper screen in a Japanese room. A square grid is divided into rectangular rooms by thin walnut frames. Your job is to shade cells until four rules are satisfied at once. THE FOUR RULES One. A room carrying a number must hold exactly that many shaded cells. A room without a number can hold any amount, including none. Two. No two shaded cells may touch edge to edge. Corner to corner is fine, so shading falls into diagonal steps. Three. Every unshaded cell must stay connected to every other unshaded cell. Shading may never fence off a pocket of white paper. Four. This is the rule that makes Heyawake its own puzzle, and the one players wrestle with longest. Take any straight line of unshaded cells, horizontal or vertical, and follow it from end to end. It may step over one room border. It may never step over two. A line of white light belongs to two rooms at most. The moment it reaches into a third room, something on that line has to be shaded. Rule four is easy to state and easy to miss, so the app makes it visible. Press Check and any run that has grown too long is drawn with a red line and a tick at every frame it crosses. Touching shaded cells get red rings. White paper that has been sealed off gets a red tint. Nothing is hidden from you and nothing is guessed at. WHAT IS IN THE APP Play. Boards at seven by seven, nine by nine and eleven by eleven. Tap once to shade a cell, twice to leave a small white note on a cell you have already reasoned must stay light, three times to clear it. A room tints green when its number is satisfied and red when it holds too much, so you always know where you stand. Undo steps back through your taps, Hint fills in one cell from the answer when you are truly stuck, and a timer runs quietly in the corner. Sizes. Choose your board and see how many you have finished at each size, along with your best time. A fresh board is built the moment you pick. Stats. A solve log: boards finished, boards finished without a single hint, average time, best time per size, total time spent at the board. How. The rules laid out in plain English, with small drawn diagrams. One diagram shows a legal white run stepping over a single frame. The next shows the same run crossing two frames, which is exactly what rule four forbids. Seeing the two side by side is usually the moment the rule clicks. Awards. Eight quiet milestones, from your first finished screen through solving without hints to forty boards folded shut. EVERY BOARD IS BUILT FOR YOU Nothing is loaded from a server and nothing is picked from a short list you will eventually memorise. Every board is generated on your device the moment you ask for it. The rooms are cut fresh, a legal shading is found by a solver that enforces all four rules, the room numbers are read off it, and then numbers are hidden one by one while a second solver keeps checking that exactly one solution survives. Only a board with a single answer ever reaches you, which means every board can be reasoned out from the numbers alone. There is never a moment where you have to guess. QUIET BY DESIGN There is no sound at all in this app. Not a click, not a chime, not a note of music. Feedback is visual, with an optional short vibration on each tap that you can switch off. The palette is rice paper cream, charcoal shading and thin walnut frames, chosen to be easy on the eyes for long sittings, and the app never switches itself to a dark theme behind your back. The app works entirely offline. It asks for no internet permission, shows no advertising, contains no analytics and no third party services, and collects nothing about you. Your progress is stored on your device and stays there. There are no accounts, no sign in and no purchases of any kind. Suitable for everyone. This is pure pencil and paper logic with no violence and nothing to wager. Pour a cup of tea, pick a screen, and start counting rooms.