Strategy · step 1 of 5

Mark the crosses first

Every cat casts a shadow. Writing the shadow down is not optional bookkeeping — it is what makes every other technique visible.

One cat, sixteen free crosses: its row, its column, and the diagonal ring.

The moment a cat lands, three rules fire at once: its row is done, its column is done, and all eight surrounding squares are forbidden (cats never touch, even diagonally). On a 10×10 board a single cat can eliminate over twenty squares.

Strong players do this as a reflex, because the payoff is never the cross itself — it is what the crosses reveal. A region that just lost three squares might be down to one. A row that looked wide open might now be pinched into a single color. Skip the crosses and those discoveries stay invisible; the board feels “stuck” even though it is not.

The habit in practice

• Place cat → sweep the row → sweep the column → ring the neighbors. Same order every time, so it becomes automatic.
• When importing into MeowSolver mid-game, this is also the first thing the hint engine checks: if a placed cat has un-crossed shadow squares, the first hint tidies them up in one tap.
• The reverse habit matters too: when a cross lands (from any technique), glance at the row, column, and region it belongs to — one of them may have just become a forced move.

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