Games
Introducing Shrooms: Find Where the Mushrooms Grow
Meet Shrooms, our daily forest logic puzzle. Forage two mushrooms in every row, column, and region, none touching. How it works, the three sizes, and a tip.
There is a particular calm that comes from a puzzle you can reason all the way through. No guessing, no luck, just a quiet grid that slowly tells you where everything has to go if you pay attention. Shrooms is built around that feeling. It hands you a forest grid and asks you to find exactly where the mushrooms grow.
It looks gentle, all soft colors and little mushroom caps, and then you make your first few moves and realize the whole board is one tight web of logic. Every square you settle tells you something about three or four others.
How Shrooms works
Every day you get a square grid split into colored regions, the dirt patches. One rule runs the entire puzzle: forage exactly two mushrooms in every row, every column, and every region.
The twist that turns it into a real puzzle is that mushrooms will not grow too close together. No two may touch, not even on a diagonal. So the moment you place one mushroom, the eight squares around it are ruled out, and the board starts to fold in on itself. Drop a mushroom into a tight corner and you can often see exactly where its partner has to go.
You play by tapping. Each cell cycles through three states: empty, then grass, then mushroom. Grass is your own no-mushroom-here mark, the way you pencil out a square you have eliminated, and it keeps the board readable as the logic gets tighter. A healthy mushroom shows a blue cap. If one ever breaks a rule, too many in a line or touching a neighbor, it turns red and poisonous so the mistake jumps right out at you.
The clock is the score
Shrooms is timed, but gently. Nothing starts until you press Start, and the clock only runs while you are actually playing, so stepping away never costs you. Your time is your score. There is no move limit and no penalty for a careful, methodical solve. Every board is built with a single guaranteed solution, so there is always one clean path of pure logic to the end, and getting there faster is the only thing to chase.
Stuck? Lean on the board
Two tools are there when you need them. A Hint points out one logical next step and explains it, then leaves the move to you. It might flag a mushroom sitting somewhere it cannot belong, squares that are blocked because they sit next to a mushroom, or a region that a mushroom would starve of room. It only highlights and explains. It never places anything for you. The Check button does something different. It tells you how many mushrooms are in the wrong spot right now, without telling you which ones, so you can confirm you are on track without spoiling the rest of the solve.
Three sizes, one day
Every day ships three separate puzzles, each timed on its own clock. Easy is an 8 by 8 grid, Medium is 10 by 10, and Hard is 12 by 12. They are not one board scaled up and down. They are three different puzzles, so you can warm up on Easy, stretch on Medium, and save Hard for when you want to really sink in. A bigger grid means more regions and more room for the no-touching rule to bite, which is where the deepest chains of deduction live.
One tip to start
Hunt for the smallest, tightest regions first. A region squeezed into a narrow shape often has only one or two ways to hold its two mushrooms, and once you lock those in, the no-touching rule cascades outward and hands you the next few squares for free. Start where the board has the least freedom, and let that certainty spread.
Shrooms is live now. Pick a size, place your first mushroom, and see how fast you can read today's forest.
