Inks

Expert Inks maps

Expert maps have twenty-five to twenty-nine regions and give away a third of them. Three to seven times, a region only gives in to a chain of what-ifs: notes help you keep track.

Practice gives you maps you haven't solved yet, as many as you like, and keeps your best time without hints. Every map is made and checked by a computer: it has exactly one answer, and logic alone gets you there.

How to play Inks

1. The map is a made-up continent, divided into regions.
2. Ink every region blue, red, yellow or green, so that no two regions sharing a border have the same ink. Regions that only meet at a point don't count as neighbors, and the maps never have any.
3. The regions with a ring come inked. There's exactly one way to ink the rest.

Pick an ink, then tap regions to ink them; tapping a region with the ink it already has wipes it off. Turn on Notes to jot down the inks a region could still take, as small dots. If two neighbors match, the border between them flashes. Undo has no limit, and Ctrl+Z takes a move back. On a keyboard, 1 to 4 pick an ink and N turns notes on and off. In the settings, Ink symbols puts a shape on each ink, so you never have to tell the colors apart.

Solving tips

• Count the neighbors' inks. A region whose neighbors already use three different inks can only take the fourth.
• Look for pairs. Two regions that touch and can only be, say, blue or red between them take one each. So any region that touches both can't be blue or red.
• Follow a chain. On harder maps, suppose a region has an ink and follow what that forces on its neighbors, and theirs. If it runs into a region with no ink left, the supposition was wrong.
• Stuck? A hint points to the regions to look at next and says why, or shows a region inked wrong.