The Doppit Almanac · No. 07

Groveit, a daily Fillomino

Grow number groves of matching size

What it is

Groveit is Doppit's printing of Fillomino. The board is a field with a scattering of digits already sown, and you sow the rest, square by square, until the whole field is parcelled into groves that match their numbers.

A 5 belongs to a grove of five and a 1 stands alone. No grove may swell past its own figure. Up to Hard, every grove starts from at least one printed digit, so you never have to work one out from bare ground. Expert drops that.

How it plays

The farming code fits on a seed packet.

• Every square grows one digit, 1 to 8.
• Side-by-side squares with the same digit form one grove, and a grove must hold exactly as many squares as its digit says.
• The soft digits were sown before you arrived and cannot be lifted.
• Grove borders draw themselves as you work. A grove at its exact size turns gold, and one that swells past its number turns red.

The difficulties

Three fields are tilled daily, and Expert is there for practice. Easy comes up in thirty seconds to a minute. Medium takes one to three minutes of honest counting. Hard is three to six minutes and keeps its best pinch for the end. Expert is hard's own nine-wide field with one rule dropped: at least two groves of three squares or more carry no digit at all, so nothing on the board points at them and you have to work out that they are there. A new board is sown every day, and it costs nothing.

Nearby in the almanac: Sandit, Summit and Islandit