One cat for every colored patch. No shared rows, no shared columns, and no two cats touching, not even at a corner.
Meowdoku is a grid puzzle wearing a cozy coat. The cats are the paint, the colored patches are the structure, and the real work is elimination. The name is a portmanteau of meow and Sudoku, but the constraint set is closer to a placement puzzle: one item per region, one item per row, one item per column, and no two items in contact. Learn the four sentences below and you have learned the whole game.
Every colored territory needs exactly one cat. Not zero, not two. That sounds like the easiest rule on the board and it is also the one that produces most of the deductions. A patch with only three legal cells left after other cats have cleared their lines is effectively solved, because one of those three has to be the answer. A patch with twelve open cells is not a place to start.
The patch rule also tells you when a board is finished. Count the patches. If the count and the number of placed cats agree, and every row, column, and diagonal check passes, the puzzle is complete. If you have placed four cats on a five-patch board, you are not nearly done; one territory is still empty and the board will not close.
A placed cat controls its entire row and its entire column. Every other candidate in those two lines is dead the moment the cat lands. This is the same arithmetic a Sudoku player uses, and it is the reason a single correct placement can cascade into three more. A row that already has a cat is done. A row with one open cell and no cat is a forced placement, provided the patch rule allows it.
Two cats may not touch diagonally. If one cat sits in a cell, all four diagonal neighbours are unavailable, even though they are in different rows and different columns. This is the rule that turns a comfortable puzzle into a strict one, and it is the rule that catches most players. A pair like row three column two and row four column three looks legal under every other check. It fails here.
The board tracks hearts, and a wrong tap spends one. There is no timer shouting at you and no score that punishes slow thinking. What you are protecting is the number of mistakes you can still afford. That changes strategy: a guess that shortens a solve by ten seconds but risks a heart is a bad trade on a board with a tight heart budget. Build the placement on paper logic first, then tap.
Most losses in Meowdoku are not caused by hard levels. They are caused by a player scanning the grid for a nice-looking cell instead of reading the structure. Spend the first thirty seconds doing no taps at all. The board rewards that pause more than any hint does.
Your first job is to learn how many territories exist and roughly how big each one is. Big patches are flexible and tell you very little early. Thin patches, single-file corridors, and detached corners are where the forced moves live. Sort the patches from smallest to largest in your head and work in that order.
A patch that wraps around the board edge is usually kinder than one that sits in the middle, because the edge removes half of its potential neighbours. A patch with only a handful of cells has a short candidate list before any other cat lands. When two thin patches overlap on a row, the interaction is often enough to settle both.
Keep a mental candidate list per patch, then delete from it. A cat clears a row, a column, and four diagonal neighbours. Four cats and their shadows usually leave a board with one remaining legal cell per patch. If you find yourself with two live candidates and no way to separate them, the answer is not a coin flip; it is another patch you have not fully crossed out yet.
Central cells touch more things. They sit in the intersection of a long row, a long column, and up to four diagonals, which means they are the most constrained once the edges are settled and the least informative when the board is empty. Players who start in the middle get a pleasant placement and a harder board. Players who start at the rim get information and fewer options. Same puzzle, different second half.
Real Meowdoku boards are larger than this, so treat the grid below as a training board built for this article, not as a game level. It has sixteen cells divided into four patches, one cat per patch, one cat per row, one cat per column, and no diagonal contact. The letters label the patches.
Teaching board: four patches, four cats, one unique solution.
Patch A is the block in rows one and two, columns one and two. Patch C is the matching block beside it. Patch B is the L that runs down the left edge and along the bottom, and patch D is the L that fills what is left.
Rows one and two can only be satisfied by patches A and C, because those two patches occupy every cell in those rows. Each row needs one cat, and A and C each need one cat, so A and C take rows one and two between them while B and D take rows three and four. That single observation cuts the search in half and costs no hearts. From here, patch B has four candidate cells, and each one can be tested against the other three rules.
Assume the cat in patch B sits at row three, column one. Patch D then has to answer on row four, and its only remaining cell is the bottom-right corner. That uses columns one and four, so patch A is pushed to column two and patch C to column three, with one on row one and the other on row two. Both splits fail. Putting A on row one leaves it beside C in the same row. Putting A on row two puts it corner to corner with the cat at row three column one. The opening looks natural and is a trap.
Move the patch B cat to the bottom row, column one. Patch D must answer on row three. Column two is impossible because patch A would have no column left, since both of its columns are already spoken for. Column three puts D diagonally against any cat on row two, so A and C would both have to use row one, which is a row conflict. Column four pushes C up to row one, and then the only row left for A touches C at a corner. Dead end again.
Now move the B cat to the bottom row, column three. Patch D has only two legal row-three cells. The left one forces A into the top-left corner and C into row two column four, and then D sits diagonally against B at the bottom. The right one takes column four away from patch C, which never recovers. Three of the four B cells are gone.
The surviving cell is the bottom row, column two. Patch D answers at row three, column four, which leaves columns one and three for A and C. Patch A takes row two column one, patch C takes row one column three, and every diagonal check passes. One placement survived, which is why this board is a puzzle instead of a coin toss.
The solved board, with each cat shown as its patch letter.
Hold the real game to that same standard. If two cells still look legal, you have not applied all four rules yet: patch count, row, column, and corner. The answer is always in the check you skipped.
The board prints its difficulty above the grid, and the tier is not decoration. Normal is the calmest setting: patches stay chunky, the easy openings are still there, and a careful player can usually reach the first two cats without spending a heart. Hard trims that comfort and expects you to work the corner rule earlier. Ultra assumes the full four-check routine on almost every placement and gives the least room for a casual tap.
The practical advice is to finish Normal once before touching the harder tiers, and to treat a lost heart as information rather than a tragedy. Every failure tells you which rule you skipped. Most often it is the diagonal, because it is the only rule that is invisible in the row and column counts. If you lose hearts repeatedly on the same tier, stop and cross out candidates on all four checks before the next tap.
The game ships a long level ladder, and the published walkthrough set currently covers levels one through 310 with a further range announced. Early levels introduce one restriction at a time, which is why they feel almost too gentle. That is not a warm-up for its own sake. Each early board removes one plausible mistake from your habits, so a later board can stack the same ideas without teaching them again.
The controls inside the frame include a level selector, a difficulty switch, a hint button, undo, and restart. Hint is the one to use last. It tells you where a cat belongs, but it does not tell you which of the four rules proved it, and the proof is the part that transfers to the next level. Undo is the honest tool: if you tap and immediately feel uncertain, undo before the next tap and re-derive the cell.
The game also exists as a phone app, with store links on its own page. The frame on this page is the browser build, so nothing is installed here and progress lives with the game rather than with Waffle Games. If the frame loads blank after a network hiccup, reload this page; the board is served by the game, not by our HTML.
When a board is done, this site has other daily puzzles of a different shape. Poople is a four-letter word ladder, Feetle is a word ladder with a different finish, and Krillion is a rarity quiz where the unpopular answer wins. Meowdoku stays the only one where the answer is a position instead of a word.
Placement happens inside the frame. Fullscreen is the only control on this page, and it only changes how much room the board gets.
| Action | Where | Control |
|---|---|---|
| Choose a level | Inside the frame | Level selector |
| Choose a tier | Inside the frame | Normal / Hard / Ultra |
| Place or remove a cat | Inside the frame | Tap a cell |
| Reveal one cat | Inside the frame | Hint |
| Take back a tap | Inside the frame | Undo |
| Clear the board | Inside the frame | Restart |
| Enlarge the board | Above the frame | Fullscreen |