How to play Quackle
Quackle is a calm daily logic puzzle. The board is a 7×7 grid split into five to seven irregularly-shaped ponds. Each pond prints a flock size — the exact number of ducks it should hold. Your job is to work out which cells hold those ducks.
Two rules govern every placement. Within each pond, the ducks must form one orthogonally-connected group — that's the flock. Across ponds, no two ducks may sit orthogonally adjacent — that's the gap at the shore. A handful of duck clues start the puzzle off.
Press Check once you think the pond is solved. Quackle tells you which
constraint failed — two flocks touching at a pond border, a flock that isn't connected,
a pond with the wrong number of ducks — but never which specific duck is wrong.
Reveal solution shows the answer with no penalty; you still get a shareable,
marked as revealed.
The twist
Region-based puzzles usually forbid adjacency inside a region (queens-style) or count shaded cells along rows and columns (nonograms). Quackle inverts both: the adjacency rule is positive within each pond (ducks must touch each other to form a flock) and negative across ponds (ducks from different ponds must not touch).
That inversion is the whole twist. The pond-shape map — which cells belong to which pond — is load-bearing information: pond geometry determines which flock shapes of the given size are even possible.
More MinCalc games
While the pond fills, try Targle — the target is given, the six-character equation isn't — or Sumrex, where you place one digit per row, column, and colour region so they add up to today's target.