Guides

How to play Lantern Grove

Somewhere in the grass, lanterns are waiting. There’s one for every row, and your job is to work out where, one little light at a time.

The rules

A garden is a square board of grass patches, split into coloured areas. Every board follows the same rules:

A finished garden. Follow any row, column or colour and you’ll meet one lantern.

Every garden has exactly one solution, so you never need luck. Each lantern is findable by thinking about where the others can’t be.

What one lantern tells you

Each lantern you find clears a lot of grass. Nothing else can be in its row, its column or its coloured area, or on any of the eight patches around it.

Everything marked here is ruled out by this one lantern. The game doesn’t mark these for you when you light a lantern, so crossing them out is part of the fun.

Your three lights

The tutorial’s first step: a small four by four garden with one glowing cell and a card explaining the rules.
The tutorial walks you through a small garden first.

You have three lights for each garden, shown as little flames at the top of the screen. Searching a patch with no lantern costs one light and locks that patch with a red X. If all three fade, the garden is lost, and you can try it again.

The way to keep your lights is simple: when you’re unsure, mark an X instead of searching. Marks cost nothing.

Your first gardens

A new game opens with a short tutorial on a gentle 4 × 4 meadow, and you can replay it from the home screen whenever you like. After that your journey begins with 6 × 6 gardens, and they get bigger and trickier as you go, up to 12 × 12.

When you’re ready for the controls in detail, read about marking and searching.