A winning Heyawake strategy on a fixed 3-by-6 board starts with reading every room clue, anchoring the first shade on a high-value cell, and treating connectivity and corridor rules as equal partners to the room count. Because every room on this fixture carries the clue 1, the puzzle reduces to placing exactly three black cells: one per room, none sharing an edge, with all fifteen remaining white cells forming a single orthogonally connected region and no straight white run crossing all three rooms. The plan below walks through reading the board, choosing each shade in the right order, and finishing on the disclosed 970-point best score using three clean actions in the Heyawake Puzzle tool. None of the steps depend on guesswork: the disclosed solution shades cells 1, 9, and 16 (the second cell of the top row, the fourth cell of the middle row, and the fifth cell of the bottom row), which is why the strategy is reproducible rather than intuitive.
Read the Fixed 3-by-6 Board Before You Move
The Lizely fixture is divided into three vertical rooms of six cells each. Every room shows the clue 1, which means you need exactly one black cell per room and a total of three across the board. That single design decision sets the upper bound on your move count: every extra shade costs ten points, so the fastest winning path is exactly three shade actions followed by validation.
Before you press a key, sketch the white region mentally. Eighteen cells, three to be black, fifteen to stay white. The white region has to remain orthogonally connected, so any shade that sits between two larger white masses without an alternative route is risky. On this board, the cleanest anchor shades live one or two cells in from the board edges, because they leave room for white cells to wrap around them through adjacent rooms.
The status display recalculates after every shade. Use that feedback to confirm each placement rather than committing to a full plan up front. Nikoli's published rules list the four constraints as room counts, adjacency, connectivity, and the two-room corridor limit. Reading the constraints together, instead of one at a time, is the strategy that turns a guess into a guarantee.
Plan and Apply Your Three Shades
- Select the second cell of the top row and press Space. This shade sits inside room 1, satisfies the clue 1, and breaks the top white run so it cannot stretch into all three rooms. Validation will mark the room satisfied and the corridor safe.
- Move down to the middle row and across to the fourth cell, then press Space. From the top row, step down once and then right two times. This shade lands inside room 2, keeps a healthy white margin on both sides, and avoids touching the previous black cell.
- Drop to the bottom row and step right to the fifth cell, then press Space. Move down once and right once. This places the final shade inside room 3. Run validation: all three room clues are satisfied, no black cells share an edge, the fifteen white cells remain connected, and no straight white corridor crosses all three rooms. The score reads 970.
The score formula is straightforward: start at 1,000 and subtract ten for every shade or unshade action. With three shades, the math is 1000 - 10 x 3 = 970 points. Any extra exploration - testing a cell, then removing it - cuts the score by twenty points per pair. Treat each Space press as a deliberate decision and you will not waste actions.
| Constraint | What it forbids | Strategic response |
|---|---|---|
| One black per room (clue 1) | A second shade inside any room | Place each shade in a different room on consecutive moves |
| No orthogonal adjacency | Two black cells sharing a side | Keep at least one white cell of horizontal or vertical gap between candidate squares |
| White connectivity | Any white region cut off from the rest | Avoid shades that trap a white cell against a wall with no white neighbor |
| Two-room corridor limit | A straight white run through all three rooms | Place one shade in each row so no straight white run crosses all three rooms |
Why Adjacency and Connectivity Shape Every Move
Two constraints decide whether a candidate cell is a legal shade: the room clue and the adjacency check. Placing a second black inside any room immediately turns the room into an irreconcilable overfilled state, so your selection cursor must always track which room the active cell belongs to. The adjacency check is stricter than it looks - diagonal contact is allowed, but any shared edge with an existing black cell is an immediate contradiction.
Connectivity is the constraint solvers forget to plan for. A shade near the corner of the middle room can detach the last white cell on one side, especially when earlier shades have already eaten into the white path. The safe approach is to confirm that every white cell still has at least one orthogonal white neighbor after each move. If a cell becomes isolated, undo the shade and pick a different anchor.
White marks created with Enter do not affect validation, but they double as a reasoning aid. Mark the cells you considered and rejected, then sweep the board to compare notes before each new shade. On a fixed 3-by-6 fixture, this habit costs nothing in points and prevents the most common mistake: shading a cell that breaks the corridor rule without realizing it.
Block Three-Room White Corridors Early
The corridor rule is the part of Heyawake strategy that catches new players off guard. A continuous horizontal or vertical run of white cells may not pass through more than two rooms. On a board with three stacked rooms, that means each row cannot run uninterrupted from the left wall to the right wall; one of the three required black cells must land inside that row.
The middle row is the highest-leverage place to spend one of your shades. Each row's white run is independent, so breaking the middle row leaves the top and bottom corridors untouched; every row needs its own black cell to satisfy the corridor limit. Break it in the bottom row and you still owe a corridor fix to the top row. The disclosed solution honors this priority by placing the second shade in the middle row, cell 9, rather than the bottom.
Reset, Boss Key, and Local Best Score
The Restart control clears every black cell, every white mark, the move counter, the score, and any contradictions in one action. Reach for it only after unshading the offending cell, since Space shades or unshades the current cell and an adjacency violation or a disconnected white region can be repaired by removing a shade. An overfilled room is unrecoverable unless a shade is removed. Underfilled rooms and overlong corridors, by contrast, are not dead ends: another legal shade may still satisfy them.
The double-tap Escape gesture summons a shared spreadsheet cover for quick privacy, then returns you to the exact board state. Best scores are stored only in localStorage, so clearing browser data resets your record. There is no account, network call, or timer; the route from a blank board to 970 points is a deterministic keyboard sequence the tool replays the same way every time.
Other Fixed Logic Strategies Worth Trying
The same disciplined approach - read constraints, anchor the highest-leverage move, audit the rest - shows up in several other Lizely puzzles. For a strategy that targets a fixed single-answer grid with similar row and column logic, see the Battleships Puzzle Strategy: Solve the 5x5 Fleet Grid guide. For a planning-heavy puzzle where the highest-leverage move decides the score, the Block Stacking Puzzle Strategy: Plan, Rotate, Recover walkthrough applies the same three-step approach.