What is Magnets?
Magnets - also written Magnete - is a pencil-and-paper logic puzzle that spread through Conceptis Puzzles and the puzzle-site networks alongside Nonograms and Kakuro. The grid is completely divided into 1x2 slabs, each covering two neighbouring cells. Your job is to decide what each slab is: a magnet, with one positive end and one negative end, or a blank plate with no charge at all.
Two kinds of clue tell you how the charges fall. The hard physical rule is that like poles repel: a + can never sit orthogonally next to another +, and a - can never sit next to another -. The counting clues live in the margins - the numbers above and below each column give how many + and how many - that column holds, and the numbers to the left and right of each row do the same for rows. Some of those margin numbers are deliberately left out, and filling the gaps they leave is half the fun.
- The whole grid is divided into 1x2 slabs, given to you at the start.
- Each slab is a magnet (one + half and one - half) or a blank plate (both halves neutral).
- Two equal poles may never be orthogonally adjacent (+ not next to +, - not next to -).
- Top and bottom numbers count the + and - in each column.
- Left and right numbers count the + and - in each row.
- Opposite poles may touch, and a blank cell never breaks the no-touch rule.
How to play Magnets online
Click or tap a slab to cycle it: the first click makes the half you clicked positive and its partner negative, the second click flips the poles, and the third returns the slab to blank. Because the two halves of a magnet are always opposite, setting one end automatically sets the other - you are really choosing the slab's state, just from whichever end is handier. Right-click clears a slab straight back to blank.
Check inspects your board and flags any cell that disagrees with the unique solution, without telling you which way to fix it. Hint completes one slab correctly, Undo steps back, Reset clears the whole board, and Solution fills everything in when you would rather study a finished grid than build it. The counters above the board track how many magnets the puzzle hides and how many you have placed so far.
- Tap a slab end to cycle it: this end +, this end -, then blank.
- Setting one half automatically sets the other to the opposite pole.
- Right-click clears a slab back to blank.
- Check highlights cells that conflict with the solution; Undo steps back.
- New puzzle builds a fresh board for the chosen size and difficulty.
Read the four margins first
Everything in Magnets begins at the edges. The top and left counts are the homes of the plus signs; the bottom and right counts are the homes of the minus signs. Before placing anything, read them like a budget: a column whose top number is 4 must end up with exactly four positive halves, no more and no fewer, and its bottom number does the same for negatives.
Zeros are the loudest clues on the board. A 0 on top of a column means that column holds no positive halves at all, so every magnet reaching into it must point its negative end there - and a magnet half that is forced negative usually forces its partner positive, which kicks the deduction into the next line. A row whose left and right numbers already add up to its full width has no room for a single blank plate, so every slab inside it must be a magnet. Saturated and empty lines like these are where you break a board open.
- Top and left numbers count + halves; bottom and right numbers count - halves.
- A 0 forbids that pole in the whole line - a powerful starting move.
- When + and - counts fill a line completely, no blank plate can fit there.
- Treat each number as an exact budget: never overshoot it, always reach it.
- Add the left counts and the top counts - both equal the total number of + halves.
Slabs think in two directions
A slab's orientation decides which clues can see it. A horizontal slab lays its two halves side by side in the same row but in different columns, so it contributes its plus and its minus to two separate columns while affecting only one row's pair of counts. A vertical slab does the reverse: its two halves sit in one column but different rows, feeding the row counts on two lines and a single column.
That split is a quiet but powerful lever. If a column needs one more positive and the only slab that can supply it is horizontal, you immediately know which of its two cells must be the plus - and its partner cell, in the next column, becomes the minus. Reading slabs by orientation also tells you where blanks must hide: when a line has met both its plus and its minus quota, any slab still poking into that line has to be neutral there, and a slab forced neutral on one cell is neutral on both, blanking out its partner elsewhere on the board.
- Horizontal slabs split their poles across two columns, one row.
- Vertical slabs split their poles across two rows, one column.
- A line that needs one pole and has one supplier pins that pole exactly.
- A slab forced blank in one cell is blank in both cells.
- Match each missing pole to the slabs that could still deliver it.
Like poles repel: the no-touch chains
The repulsion rule does more work than it first appears. Place a positive half and you have quietly banned a plus from all four of its neighbours; if one of those neighbours is the end of a slab whose other clues already rule out a blank, that neighbour is forced negative, which forces its partner positive, which bans plus from four more cells. A single confident pole can ripple across a whole corner of the grid.
Edges and corners amplify the effect because cells there have fewer neighbours to absorb the pressure, so a forced pole leaves fewer escape routes. The rule also gives you a clean contradiction test: if completing a slab one way would place two equal poles side by side, that way is simply illegal, and the slab must take the other orientation or stay blank. Many Magnets boards are solved less by the numbers than by chasing these repulsion chains until only one arrangement survives.
- A placed + bans + from its four neighbours; a placed - bans -.
- A banned pole on a forced magnet flips it, and the flip propagates.
- Corners and edges make repulsion chains bite harder.
- If an orientation makes equal poles touch, discard it on sight.
- Chase the chains: one certain pole often settles a whole region.
Where Magnets comes from
Magnets belongs to the family of grid puzzles that reached a mass audience through Conceptis Puzzles, the studio that helped carry Nonograms, Hashi and Kakuro from specialist magazines into daily newspapers and apps around the world. Under the German name Magnete it travelled through European puzzle pages, and the puzzle-site networks gave it the plain, descriptive English title it carries here.
Its appeal is the unusual mixture at its core. The margin numbers feel like a Nonogram or a Kakuro - a counting puzzle solved from the edges in. The repulsion rule feels like a graph-colouring or a no-touch placement puzzle. And the fixed slabs add a tiling flavour all of their own, because every decision you make about one cell instantly commits its partner. Few puzzles braid three such different ideas together so neatly, which is exactly why Magnets rewards a flexible solver.
Magnets vs Nonograms and other count puzzles
If you have solved Nonograms or Kakurasu, the margins of a Magnets board will look familiar: numbers around the edge that count something inside each line. The difference is what they count and what else constrains you. A Nonogram clue describes runs of shaded cells in order; a Kakurasu clue weights cells by position; a Magnets clue simply tallies how many of one pole live in the line, with no order at all. The ordering work that Nonograms demand is replaced in Magnets by the repulsion rule and the fixed slabs.
That makes Magnets feel like a counting puzzle and a placement puzzle at once. You spend part of your time balancing budgets in the margins, the way you would in a number puzzle, and part of your time worrying about which cells may legally touch, the way you would in a shading or domino puzzle. Solvers who enjoy Nonograms for their edge logic, or domino puzzles like Dominosa for their tiling logic, usually find Magnets a satisfying bridge between the two.
- Nonograms: ordered runs of shaded cells from edge clues.
- Kakurasu: position-weighted sums from edge clues.
- Dominosa: pure 1x2 tiling logic with numbered cells.
- Magnets: unordered pole counts, plus repulsion, plus fixed slabs.
- Magnets blends counting-puzzle and placement-puzzle thinking.
Grid sizes and difficulty levels
The 6x6 boards are the place to learn the reflexes: short rows and columns, generous margins, and zeros that hand you easy openings. On 8x8 the slabs interlock in longer chains, the orientation logic starts to matter, and you will meet your first boards where a repulsion chain in one corner is the only way to settle a count in another. The 10x10 boards are full puzzles - long lines, many slabs, and deductions that travel right across the grid before a single pole becomes certain.
Difficulty is set by how many margin numbers you are given. Easy boards keep most of the counts, so almost every line can be budgeted directly. Medium removes more, leaning on orientation and repulsion to fill the gaps. Hard keeps the margins sparse, so you spend more time reasoning about which slabs can supply a missing pole than about any single number. Whatever you choose, a solver checks every board before you see it and removes clues only as far as a single solution survives - so even the sparsest hard puzzle is solvable by pure logic, never by guessing.
- 6x6 - learn the margins, the zeros and the partner reflex.
- 8x8 - longer slab chains and real orientation logic.
- 10x10 - many slabs and deductions that cross the whole grid.
- Easy, medium and hard change how many margin numbers you get.
- Every puzzle is verified to have exactly one solution.