Best Shading

Jim Blinn is an American computer graphics researcher best known for developing the Blinn-Phong shading model and bump mapping, techniques that became foundational in real-time and offline rendering. While at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he produced landmark computer-animated visualizations of...

Heyawake is a grid-based logic puzzle published by Nikoli, played on a rectangular grid subdivided into rectangular rooms. The solver must shade some cells according to three constraints: numbered rooms contain exactly the indicated number of shaded cells; no two shaded cells may be orthogonally adj...

Tapa is a wall-shading puzzle invented by Turkish puzzle designer Serkan Yürekli in which cells are blacked out to create one connected wall, guided by clue numbers showing adjacent shaded-cell group sizes.

Shakashaka is a logic puzzle published by Nikoli in which solvers place right-angled triangles in white grid cells. Each triangle occupies half of its cell and points in one of four orientations. The remaining unshaded white areas must each form a rectangle, and numbered clues indicate how many tria...

Kuromasu is a shading logic puzzle published by Nikoli. Solvers mark cells black or leave them white based on numbered clues in circles that indicate how many white cells are visible from that position across the four orthogonal directions, including the clued cell itself. Black cells may not share...

Cave, also known as Corral, is a logic puzzle in which the solver shades cells to form a single enclosed cave so that every numbered white cell can see exactly that many white cells in its row and column.

Fill-a-Pix is a Minesweeper-variant picture puzzle created by Trevor Truran in which each numbered cell indicates how many of the nine cells in its 3×3 neighborhood must be filled, revealing a pixel image when complete.

Kurotto is a grid-based logic puzzle published by the Japanese company Nikoli. The puzzle is played on a rectangular grid where certain cells contain numbers enclosed in circles. The objective is to shade specific cells black so that the number in each circled cell accurately represents the total si...

Snake Puzzle is a grid-based logic puzzle where solvers must trace a non-self-intersecting path (the "snake") through a rectangular grid according to specific constraints. These constraints typically include row and column entry counts, plus directional clues indicating where the path enters and exi...

Clouds, also known as Radar, is a grid deduction puzzle in which rectangular cloud shapes of given minimum size must be placed so the count of cloud cells in each row and column matches the border clues.

Doppelblock is a Japanese logic puzzle where solvers shade two cells in each row and column of a grid. The unshaded cells must contain numbers that satisfy Latin square constraints (no repetition in any row or column) while also matching the clue numbers provided outside the grid, which typically in...

Mochikoro is a Japanese logic puzzle published by Nikoli, sharing similarities with the better-known Nurikabe puzzle. In Mochikoro, solvers must create rectangular white islands of the size indicated by numbered cells, while ensuring that all shaded cells form a single connected region without any 2...