💡 How to play Lights Out
By Miguel Arechaga
Lights Out looks like a simple game of tapping squares, but each move affects more than one light at a time, so you need a bit of strategy to avoid going in circles. Here's how it works and the most reliable method to solve it.
What is Lights Out?
It's a logic puzzle on a grid of cells that can be lit or dark. When the game starts, some lights come on at random, and your goal is to turn them all off by tapping cells until the whole board goes dark.
How to play Lights Out step by step
- Look at the board and find which cells are lit.
- Tap a cell: doing so toggles the state of that cell and its direct neighbors (up, down, left and right).
- A lit light turns off and a dark one turns on every time it or a neighbor gets tapped.
- Keep tapping cells until every light is off at the same time.
- The goal is to do it in the fewest taps possible.
Strategy: solve row by row from the top
The most reliable way to solve Lights Out without guessing is to work row by row, from top to bottom. The first row can only be "fixed" by tapping cells in the row below it, so first decide which cells in row 2 you'll tap so row 1 ends up completely dark, and repeat the process row by row until you reach the last one.
One key detail: tapping the same cell twice is the same as not tapping it at all, because the two changes cancel out. That's why, for every cell on the board, you only ever need to decide whether to tap it once or not at all, never more.
Quick tips to stay on track
- Think of each tap as a switch that "adds" a change; the order you tap in doesn't matter, only which cells you tap.
- If you finish a row and the next one seems impossible to fully clear, double-check your earlier taps before continuing blindly.
- Always start from the top corner and move the same direction so you don't lose track of which row is already solved.
- The fewer taps you use, the better your score, so avoid tapping a cell "just to try it" if you're not sure of its effect.
Lights Out is a great exercise in chained logic: each decision shapes the next, much like filling in a Sudoku cell by cell until you close out the whole board.
🏆 Best-run ranking
Lights Out has its own global ranking: it saves the run you solved with the fewest moves. Go to Ranking, the 🕹️ 1 Player tab, choose "Lights Out" from the dropdown, and compare your score with other players, synced to your account. For your result to count you need a free account on MundoSudoku (just a username and password, no email required): you can play without one, but without logging in your score won't be saved to the ranking.
