Tents

Tents is a logic puzzle on a grid dotted with trees. Your job is to place tents so that each tree gets exactly one tent pitched in an orthogonally adjacent cell, and every tent pairs with exactly one tree. The numbers along the edges tell you how many tents belong in each row and column.

• Each tree has one tent directly beside it (up, down, left or right) and they pair one-to-one.
• No two tents may touch, not even diagonally.
• The row and column numbers count the tents in that line; clues turn green when satisfied and red when exceeded.

• Desktop: click an empty cell to cycle empty → tent → grass (✕) → empty. Right-click toggles a grass mark directly. Use Auto-grass to fill obvious empties and Hint for a nudge.
• Phone & tablet: tap a cell to cycle through tent and grass marks, no keyboard needed.

• Sizes, 6×6, 8×8 and 10×10 grids of growing difficulty.
• Daily, one shared puzzle each day.
• Practice, endless fresh boards on demand.

• Mark grass first: any cell not next to a tree can never hold a tent, so ✕ it to clear the clutter.
• A row or column whose clue is 0 is entirely grass, fill it immediately.
• When a tree has only one open neighbour left, its tent is forced; then grass out everything touching that tent.

Tents is a puzzle type with no documented first appearance, circulated widely enough in collections and software that its origin has simply not been recorded.

Structurally it is a matching problem dressed as a picture. Every tree must be paired with exactly one tent in an orthogonally adjacent cell, and every tent with exactly one tree — a one-to-one correspondence, which is a different demand from the counting that drives most grid logic puzzles.

The edge numbers then layer a counting constraint on top of the matching, and the no-touching rule keeps tents from clustering. The result is that a tree with several plausible neighbours usually cannot be resolved on its own — it is decided by what some distant row total forces elsewhere.

Tents (sometimes called Tents and Trees) is a one-solution deduction puzzle that blends adjacency and counting rules into a satisfying logical chain. This is an original, free browser version with daily and practice modes, playable instantly with no download or sign-up.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.