Tap a square to mark it empty. Double-tap to place a cat. One cat in every colour, row and column, and no two cats touching, even diagonally.
Privacy. This game collects nothing. There are no accounts, ads or tracking, and nothing you do is sent anywhere. Your level, best times and settings are saved only in this browser on this device, and clearing site data removes them. The only outside request is to Google Fonts to load the typefaces.
Where it comes from. Hidden Cats belongs to a family of placement puzzles. It goes back to the eight queens puzzle, published by Max Bezzel in 1848. The coloured-region version is Star Battle, created by Hans Eendebak for the 2003 World Puzzle Championship in the Netherlands, and it became widely known as Queens after LinkedIn added it to its games in 2024.
How levels work. Grids are generated on your device, each with exactly one solution. A level number is a fixed seed, so level 12 is the same grid on every device, and higher levels need harder deductions. There are 5,242 ways to place the cats, each paired with a vast number of colour maps, so the puzzles are effectively endless. Your progress is saved only on this device. New grid moves to the next seed for that level and can repeat a grid after a reload.