Tents Rules

Objective:

After a physically demanding yet refreshing and enjoyable trek into the wilderness, your group has decided to make camp. It has fallen to you to decide where to pitch tents, one tent beside each tree. To maintain social harmony, everyone desires open space between nearby tents. The numbers heading each column and row indicate how many tents are in each. Your solution must abide by these guidelines.

Setup:

The campground features a scattering of trees punctuating the grassland. When starting a new game, you choose the campground dimensions and quantity of tree and tent pairings.

Moves:

• Click or tap to place a tent next to a tree. If tents are too close, adjacently or diagonally, the campers will reject such tight proximity.
• Mark a square as unoccupied grass by right-clicking or long-tapping it. This is useful to indicate when you think a tent could never occupy a particular square.
• Click or tap on the number in the row or column header to fill the remaining spaces with grass. This number is the sum of tents in that row or column in the solution, and after placing the stated number of tents you can use this feature to quickly fill remaining squares with grass.

Winning:

You win the game of Tents when you have correctly placed all tents. All tents must be placed, the number of tents must match the sums indicated in the row and column headers, and no two tents may be next to one another adjacently or diagonally. Note that there may be more than one solution for a given campground; you only need to find one of those valid solutions.

Strategy and Hints:

Tents is about narrowing down the possibilities, where tents cannot be, leaving only where tents could be. Chisel down the options until the answer makes itself obvious.

• Quickly spot rows or columns that have no tents (the row or column header sum is zero) and fill them with grass.
• Mark squares as grass that lie at least two spaces away from any trees, as tents could never be placed there.
• Reason about where tent could possibly be and where they cannot be along a row, a column, or around a cluster of trees.
• Match row or column sums with remaining open spaces in the row or column and think about how they could be and cannot be populated with tents.