Petdoku: Cozy Puzzle Games

What Petdoku is

Petdoku is a logic-grid puzzle that fuses two classics: the clue deduction of Minesweeper and the cell-by-cell reasoning of Sudoku. The catalog files it under logic and sudoku, rates it Medium, and estimates sessions around ten minutes on desktop and mobile. The theme is gentle — the board hides a map of a dog's favourite territory, and clearing the logic is how the picture comes into view.

It is a puzzle for players who already like one of its parents and want the other: the grid reads like a Sudoku board, while the clue logic asks for the neighbour-counting discipline Minesweeper taught a generation. Nothing about the interface is exotic — a grid, a tap, and a mark — so the whole challenge lives in the reasoning rather than in learning a new control scheme.

How to play, step by step

The catalog lists a single control: tap to mark a cell with an X. That is the entire vocabulary — you read the clues the board gives you, decide what a cell must be, and mark it to record the deduction. The game is turn-free and pressure-free; the clock is yours, and the only cost of a wrong mark is the walk back over your own reasoning.

Logic grids reward a specific reading order. Start from the cells whose clues constrain the least space, resolve them, and let each answer shrink the possibilities in the cells around it. The X marks are bookkeeping rather than scoring: they are how you keep a chain of deduction straight, so that a later clue does not send you back over ground you already cleared.

The habit that separates a smooth solve from a stall is patience with the clues you cannot use yet. Every grid hands out some information that only becomes actionable later, and marking the cells you have resolved keeps that deferred information visible instead of buried under your own short-term memory.

Technique: deduction over guessing

The failure mode in every grid puzzle is the same: guessing when a forced move exists. A forced move is a cell where the current clues permit exactly one value; a guess is a cell where they permit two or more. Sweep the board for the forced moves first — they are free progress — and consider a guess only once you have confirmed the board is genuinely ambiguous from where you stand.

The second habit is to re-read old clues after every new mark. A clue that was unhelpful in isolation often becomes decisive once a neighbour is resolved, because the answer you just committed removes the alternatives it was holding open. Marking cells with an X makes this cheap: a glance at the marked grid shows what is settled, so your attention stays on the frontier instead of on remembering.

A contradiction is information, not a dead end. If a line of reasoning collapses two clues into a conflict, you have learned that an earlier assumption was wrong — backtrack to the last forced move you actually trusted, and treat everything after it as unproven. Puzzles of this family stay solvable by pure logic, so a contradiction almost always means a step was guessed rather than deduced.

Difficulty, sessions and devices

The Medium rating reflects the merge: the rules are simple, but the deduction chains run longer than either parent alone. Ten minutes is a fair session estimate, and the portrait orientation suits the phone-in-hand puzzle habit — short sittings, a clean board, no downtime and no timer breathing down your neck.

It runs free in the browser on desktop and mobile, with no download and no account, and the game page's Facts table carries the current controls and accessibility notes for the third-party build. If the merge clicks, the sudoku and logic hubs one click away collect the site's other grid puzzles by how much reasoning each one asks for.

Frequently asked questions