Strategy · step 3 of 5

Confinement & locked sets

You do not need to know where a region’s cat goes to profit from knowing roughly where it must be.

The purple region lives entirely in row 2 — so row 2’s cat is purple, and the yellow and blue squares in that row are dead.

The purple region’s cat has to go somewhere in the purple squares — and every purple square sits in the same row. That row gets exactly one cat, and purple has now claimed it. Every non-purple square in the row is a cross, even though the cat’s exact position is still unknown.

The same logic runs in every direction: a region confined to one column claims that column; and mirrored, a row or column whose survivors are all one color claims that region — so the region’s squares outside the line all die.

Locked pairs and triples

The grown-up version: if two regions only have survivors in the same two rows, those two cats occupy both rows between them — every square of any other color in those rows is a cross. The same holds for three regions in three rows, and for columns. Meowdoku hard levels and late-game Queens boards lean on pairs constantly; triples and quadruples are rarer but MeowSolver checks for them too (they show up as “locked set” hints).

How to spot it without exhaustive search

• Watch regions as they shrink. The moment a region’s survivors fit in one line, fire.
• Long skinny regions are born confined — check them before making any marks at all.
• Scan lines whose survivors look monochrome; that is the mirrored version staring at you.

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