Every Other Puzzle in Your Catalog Asks the Reader to Fill Something In. This One Starts Full.
Look at your last three titles. A sudoku with empty squares. A word search with letters to find. A number puzzle with blanks. Different covers, same instruction on every page: fill this in. Your reader feels the sameness before you do, and so does the browsing shopper who scrolls past your thumbnail because it looks like the four above it.
Hitori arrives full. Every cell already holds a number, and the solver has exactly one move available: shade a cell out. Keep shading until no number repeats in any row or column, without ever letting two shaded cells touch and without ever cutting a white cell off from the rest. It is the same deduction a sudoku solver enjoys, run in reverse, and the finished page looks like nothing else in the aisle: a scatter of black tiles across a grid of numbers, closer to a mosaic than to a worksheet.
Hitori is a long-established Japanese logic puzzle that most self-publishers have never generated, which is the rare combination you want: proven as a puzzle, unclaimed as a product. Puzzle Maker Pro makes them. Every board is proved solvable by pure logic before it reaches you, every answer key comes out of the same pass, and there is no word list or source content to prepare first. See for yourself before you decide anything: download the free demo.
Why Hitori Earns a Place in Your Catalog
The safest-looking puzzle categories are the ones every other creator picked for the same reason, which is why they stopped being safe. What you actually want is a puzzle that looks approachable on a thumbnail and turns out to be new in the solver’s hands. Those two things usually pull against each other. Hitori is one of the few places they do not.
On the shelf it reads as a number puzzle, so nobody has to be talked into it. In the reader’s hands it plays nothing like one, because the grid is already full and the answer is what you take away.
Three rules. That is the whole game:
- No number repeats among the white cells. In every row and every column, each number may appear at most once among the cells left white. A repeat is legal only when one of the pair has been shaded away.
- Shaded cells never touch edge to edge. Two black cells may not share a side. Corner contact is fine and happens constantly, which is what gives a solved board its diagonal, tiled look.
- The white cells stay in one piece. You must be able to walk from any white cell to any other through white cells, moving up, down, left, or right. Shading that strands a cell is illegal even when the first two rules are perfectly happy.
That third rule is the one that makes Hitori worth publishing rather than merely worth generating. It is the rule beginners forget and experienced solvers hunt with, and it is why a 12 x 12 board holds an adult for a proper sitting instead of five minutes.
There is also nothing to source. No dictionary, no theme word list, no image bank, no shape library. Two settings and a quantity produce a book’s worth of puzzles, which matters more than it sounds when you are the entire production department.
Every Hitori Board Has One Solution, and Not One of Them Needs a Guess
This is the difference between a puzzle you sell and a puzzle you apologise for in a review reply.
A generated puzzle is worthless to you if a reader can find a second answer, so the generator is built to make that impossible rather than unlikely. It starts from a grid where every row and column is already all-distinct, lays a legal shading pattern over it, then rewrites each shaded cell’s number so that the shading becomes forced. Before any board is accepted, a solver runs it from empty using deduction only. If pure logic cannot settle every single cell, the board is discarded and the generator tries again.
That one gate delivers both promises at once:
- Exactly one solution. Never a second valid shading, never an ambiguous board, never the email about page 34.
- No guessing, ever. Easy, Medium, and Hard are all held to the same standard. A harder Hitori is a longer chain of reasoning, never a coin flip.
Four techniques are all a solver ever needs, and the generator guarantees they are always sufficient: a white cell shades its twins, a shaded cell whitens its neighbours, a number flanked by a matching pair stays white, and any cell whose shading would strand the white region stays white. Nothing exotic. Nothing that requires a solving guide your reader does not have.
The answer key comes out of the same pass, on its own sheet, so you are never solving your own book at midnight to build the back matter.
Want to check the claim rather than take it? Generate a few in the free demo and work one through.
Look at a Board Before You Read Another Word
For a puzzle most buyers have never met, the page is the pitch. So look first.
The full grid of numbers on the left, and on the right the black tiles that make every remaining number unique in its row and column.
The gentlest warm-up and the size that will occupy someone for an evening, the same three rules running both.
The same puzzle, retargeted at a completely different reader.
Who This Is For
Self-publishers who have run out of ways to look different. If your last three books were sudoku and word search, the problem was never your covers. Hitori puts a genuinely different page inside a book that still sits in the category shoppers already browse.
Publishers tired of sourcing and cleaning content. Every word puzzle you publish is a word list you had to find, check, and keep legal. Hitori has no content dependency at all, so the only inputs are a size and a difficulty. If you have been buying ready-made puzzle content to keep the volume up, this is the other end of that trade: you own the output, you set the size and difficulty of every page, and nobody else is selling the identical book.
Teachers and tutors. Every student in the room reads the same board, whatever their reading level or confidence with numbers, so nobody starts a step behind. It rewards checking before committing, and a wrong shade shows up immediately, which is a habit that is hard to teach with a worksheet. Differentiate by changing the grid size rather than by writing a second sheet. Puzzle and answer key render as separate sheets, so a class set prints without the key while you keep one copy for marking. Worth knowing before you run thirty copies: the solution page fills its shaded cells solid near-black, which is heavy on toner.
Site owners and course builders. Puzzles your visitors actually play, in the browser, on your own pages, with your own message on the finish screen.
Build a Graded Hitori Book in One Setup
One Hitori page is a curiosity. A hundred of them, climbing from a gentle 5 x 5 to a punishing 12 x 12, is a product with a reason to exist.
Time Saver builds that batch from rows, each row carrying its own grid size, difficulty, and quantity. Four rows of twenty-five, opening at 6 x 6 Easy and finishing at 12 x 12 Hard, is a hundred-puzzle book in one run. Hitori will even build those rows for you: it ramps across grid size and difficulty on its own, so the graded book is one dialog instead of forty separate setups. Productivity.
Puzzle Book Studio then turns the set into a finished interior: trim size, margins, running heads, and the answer-key section, laid out and print-ready. Creative handles one puzzle set. Productivity combines several collections in one book, which is how you put Hitori alongside another logic type you already own and ship a mixed title rather than a second single-puzzle book. From Lite upward, Instant Puzzle Books does the fast version instead, producing a book PDF straight from your current settings without the layout control.
The page count works in your favour here. Every puzzle carries a solution, so a hundred-puzzle book is 200 interior pages before front matter, comfortably clear of print-on-demand minimums.
Swap the Numbers in a Hitori Grid for Your Own Pictures
Most number puzzles are stuck being number puzzles. A sudoku solver is reading nine distinct symbols but is also, quietly, reading digits, and a themed sudoku is a novelty rather than a different book.
Hitori has no such attachment, and this is provable rather than decorative: the solver only ever asks whether two symbols are the same, never which is larger or what order they come in. Nothing in the puzzle reads magnitude. So any set of distinct symbols carries the puzzle exactly as digits do.
From Creative up, the Content tab lets you print the board in letters, in colour-shapes, or in your own pictures. Load twelve animal icons and the 12 x 12 board becomes a children’s title. Load bells, trees, and stars and the same generator produces the seasonal edition. Load your own logo set and it is a branded corporate giveaway. The board size decides how many distinct items you need, five for a 5 x 5 up to twelve for a 12 x 12, and if you supply fewer the software tells you exactly how many you picked and how many the grid needs instead of quietly printing a mixture.
Creative hands you the design as well, the number font and colour, the canvas, the cell fill, and the grid lines, so the animal edition and the corporate one do not have to share a look. One engine, and a shelf of books that are not obviously related unless you want them to be.
Teach Hitori Live with Puzzle Slides
Hitori is the rare puzzle a whole room can solve at once, because there is only ever one decision on the table: this cell, black or white?
Puzzle Slides exports your set as an interactive PowerPoint deck with a bank of draggable shade tiles, so a class argues its way through a board on the projector. Drag a tile onto a cell, defend it, drag it back when someone spots the row it breaks. It opens in any standard PowerPoint viewer, with nothing to install and nothing to sign into.
The rules fit on one slide and need no reading level, so a single worked example sends a room off solving. That takes the puzzle places a word game cannot follow: a mixed-ability class, a tutoring session with a reluctant reader, a webinar warm-up, and a memory-care activity hour where the 12 x 12 boards print large and read clearly. Creative Interactive or Productivity Interactive.
Hand a Reader a Board They Can Solve on Screen
Not every reader wants a pencil. The interactive PDF puts one checkbox in every cell, so the board is solved by clicking rather than printing, and the mark stays translucent so the number underneath is still readable, which matters here because the number is the thing the solver is reasoning about. It is the same file you would have sold as a printable, doing a second job. Creative Interactive or Productivity Interactive.
Publish Hitori Puzzles That Play on Your Own Website
The same batch you send to print will also run in a browser, and that second copy costs you nothing to make.
Export the batch as web output, upload it to the free BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin, and the puzzles are live on your own pages. Visitors click a cell to shade it and click again to clear it, which is the entire control scheme, because shading is the only move Hitori has. Two shaded cells that end up touching light up straight away; the full rules check runs when the player presses the check button. Present the set as a simple puzzle list they choose from, or as a leveled game where levels unlock in order, progress and stars save in the visitor’s own browser, and a finish screen shows your message and your button.
Time the offer for the moment they finish. Someone who has just shaded their way through five of your boards has already decided they like this puzzle, and your button is sitting right there when they do. Between visits, the set does the quiet work of keeping people on your pages. For a course, set the levels as a practice path a learner works through at their own pace, with one caveat worth knowing up front: progress saves in each visitor’s own browser, so nothing is reported back to you and there is no class dashboard. Creative Interactive or Productivity Interactive.
Which Edition Should You Choose?
The short version: want pictures instead of numbers and a properly laid-out book, take Creative. Want to build books in batches, take Productivity. Want your puzzles playable on screen or online, add Interactive to either.
Lite holds nothing back from the puzzle itself. Every grid size, every difficulty, every answer key, and all four print formats are in the entry edition. The higher editions change what you can do around the puzzle.
| Lite | Creative | Creative Interactive | Productivity | Productivity Interactive | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All 8 grid sizes, all 3 difficulties | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Answer key with every puzzle | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Instant Puzzle Books | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Letters, colour-shapes, or your own pictures in the cells | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Styling control (numbers, canvas, cell fill, grid lines) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Puzzle Book Studio | No | One puzzle set per book | One puzzle set per book | Several collections in one book | Several collections in one book |
| Time Saver batch creation | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Interactive PDF | No | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Puzzle Slides | No | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Web play on your own site | No | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Commercial license | Sell to readers and end customers | Sell to readers and end customers | Sell to readers and end customers | Also sell or supply to other publishers | Also sell or supply to other publishers |
Interactive is a separate choice rather than a higher rung. It adds the three on-screen outputs, interactive PDF, Puzzle Slides, and web play, and it combines with either Creative or Productivity.
Pick your edition at the top of this page once you know which of those three you are after.
Try It Before You Buy
The fastest way to judge a puzzle you have never solved is to solve one. The free demo generates real Hitori boards and real answer keys, so you can work one through, print one, and decide whether it earns a place in your catalog before you spend anything. No card, no subscription.
Licensing and Commercial Use
- Lite and Creative include a commercial license to sell the puzzles you generate to readers and end customers: books, worksheets, and printables on Amazon KDP, Etsy, Teachers Pay Teachers, or your own store.
- Productivity adds a business license, so you can also sell or supply the puzzles you generate to other publishers and sellers.
- Buying in order to sell? Take Creative or above. Creative is the edition that comes with the commercial license, so starting there settles the question before you publish anything.
Product Details
| Product | Puzzle Maker Pro – Hitori |
| What it is | Windows desktop software that generates Hitori puzzles and answer keys |
| Editions | Lite, Creative, Creative Interactive, Productivity, Productivity Interactive |
| Platform | Windows desktop. There is no Mac version. |
| Internet required | No, for creating puzzles. Publishing web play needs your own self-hosted WordPress site. |
| Grid sizes | 8 square sizes, 5 x 5 through 12 x 12. Hitori grids are always square. |
| Difficulty | Easy, Medium, Hard. Guess-free at every band. |
| Cell content | Numbers on every edition. Letters, colour-shapes, or your own pictures from Creative up. |
| Solution pages | Yes, an answer key generated with every puzzle, on its own sheet |
| Print and image output | PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF |
| Interactive PDF | Interactive add-on. One checkbox per cell. |
| Puzzle Slides | Interactive add-on |
| Web output (JSON, HTML) | Interactive add-on |
| Time Saver | Productivity |
| Puzzle Book Studio | Creative and above. Instant Puzzle Books from Lite. |
| Commercial license | Sell to readers (Creative); adds selling to other publishers and sellers (Productivity). Lite: see Licensing above. |
| Free demo | Yes |
| Delivery | Immediate, in your member area |
Questions Before You Buy
Is there a free demo?
Yes. Generate real Hitori boards, inspect the answer keys, and decide before you spend anything.
Will my readers know how to play?
The rules take one short paragraph and no prior knowledge, which is why Hitori travels so well into a general puzzle audience. Print the three rules on the first page and you are done. There is also a free how to play Hitori guide you can point readers to.
Do the puzzles always have exactly one solution?
Yes. A board is accepted only when a solver can settle every cell from an empty start using deduction alone, which proves the solution is unique and that no guessing is required.
How different are Easy, Medium, and Hard?
They shade a different proportion of the board, and more shading generally means a longer solve. In practice the three bands sit closer together than their names suggest, so grid size is the stronger difficulty lever. For a book that visibly gets harder, ramp the size and use the bands for finer grading inside it.
Can I make rectangular Hitori grids?
No. Hitori grids are square, so one setting controls both dimensions, from 5 x 5 to 12 x 12.
Can I put pictures or letters in the cells instead of numbers?
Yes, from Creative up. The Content tab offers letters, colour-shapes, or your own images, and the puzzle plays identically because the solver is only ever matching symbols to each other. You need as many distinct items as the grid is wide, so five for a 5 x 5 and twelve for a 12 x 12. On Lite the Content tab is visible but locked, and cells stay as numbers.
Can I change the colour of the shaded cells?
Not in this version. Shaded cells print solid near-black and that one surface is not exposed on the Style tab, so plan your solution pages, and your paper stock, around a dark fill. Everything else, the numbers, canvas, cell fill, and grid lines, is yours from Creative up.
Which edition do I need to build a whole book in one go?
Productivity. Time Saver is a Productivity capability, so Creative Interactive does not include batch creation on its own. The full walkthrough is in how to create Hitori puzzles.
Can I regenerate the same set of puzzles later?
No. Every run produces fresh random grids, so export and archive each batch, puzzles and answer keys together, as soon as you generate it.
Can I sell the puzzles I make?
Yes, from Creative up. Creative covers selling to readers and end customers; Productivity adds selling or supplying to other publishers.
Print a Page Your Category Has Not Seen Yet
The trouble with publishing the puzzle everyone publishes is that there is nothing left to compete on except the cover and the price, and both of those are races you win by spending more rather than by making something better.
A year from now your catalog could hold a run of Hitori titles: a children’s edition where the cells are animals, a seasonal one where they are bells and trees, a large-print volume of 12 x 12 boards for solvers who want a whole evening, and a free set playing on your own website that hands every finisher a button to the book. Same engine behind all four, and a shelf that finally does not look like everyone else’s.
Make one tonight and put a pencil on it. Whether Hitori belongs in your catalog is not a question you will need five minutes to answer.
