Summary: Masyu puzzles are created in Puzzle Maker Pro by picking a board size and a difficulty band, then generating the puzzle with its matching answer key. This guide walks through making your first one, restyling it, replacing the pearls with your own artwork, titling it, and scaling a single puzzle into a finished book.
Overview
Masyu is one of the quickest modules to set up, because there is very little to decide: a board size and a difficulty. Puzzle Maker Pro does the rest — it draws a random closed loop, derives the pearls that loop implies, thins them to the difficulty you asked for, and checks after every removal that the board still solves by pure deduction. What you get back is a puzzle page and its answer key, guaranteed to have exactly one solution and to need no guessing.
New to the puzzle itself? Read How Masyu Puzzles Work first — it covers the two pearl rules and the openings worth knowing.
Required Modules
Puzzle Maker Pro – Masyu – Pearl Logic. The editions stack, each one adding to the last:
- Masyu (Standard)— makes Masyu puzzles at every board size and every difficulty, with the classic black and white pearl discs, static JPG/PNG/SVG/PDF output, and Instant Puzzle Books.
- Creative — everything in Lite, plus pearl artwork (your own pictures in place of the discs), full design control, and Puzzle Book Studio Creative.
- Creative Interactive — everything in Creative, plus the Interactive add-on: JSON web output, online gameplay, and Puzzle Slides.
- Productivity — everything in Creative (pearl artwork included), plus Time Saver for batch creation and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity.
- Productivity Interactive — Productivity plus the Interactive add-on.
- The quick buying rule: batch only → Productivity. Batch plus online play → Productivity Interactive. Time Saver comes from the Productivity tier itself, not from the interactive add-on, so Creative Interactive does not include batch creation.
Commercial use: Standard and Creative include a licence to sell what you make to readers and end customers (KDP, Etsy, Teachers Pay Teachers, your own store), and Productivity adds a business licence to sell or supply to other publishers. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
A free demo is available, so you can try Masyu before buying: download the demo.
Preparation
Nothing is needed to make your first puzzle. Masyu uses no word list, no image list and no internet connection — the board carries only pearls, so there is no content to supply and nothing to translate. An 8 × 8 board on Medium is the default and a comfortable place to start. Every puzzle is generated together with its matching answer key.
If you plan to use your own pearl artwork (Creative and above), have two square images ready — one for the black pearl, one for the white.
Choose the Board and Difficulty
Open Masyu – Pearl Logic from the puzzle list. The two settings that shape the puzzle are both on the Main tab.
- Board size — a dropdown of thirteen boards: squares 5 × 5, 6 × 6, 7 × 7, 8 × 8, 9 × 9, 10 × 10 and 12 × 12, plus rectangles 8 × 6, 6 × 8, 10 × 8, 8 × 10, 12 × 10 and 10 × 12. The default is 8 × 8.
It is a fixed list rather than two size boxes because Masyu’s supported range depends on the parity of the sides — the list only offers boards measured to generate reliably, which is why there is no 11 × 11. The FAQ explains why.
- Difficulty — Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert. The default is Medium.
Difficulty is set by how many pearls stay on the board. Puzzle Maker Pro works out the complete set of pearls the loop supports, then removes roughly 8% of them on Easy, 22% on Medium, 40% on Hard and 55% on Expert. Fewer pearls means less to start from — it does not mean a different rule set, and it never means guessing. Any removal that would break pure-deduction solvability is put back.
Quantity sits in the header panel above the tabs, not on the Main tab. Set it there.
Puzzles are de-duplicated within a run, so a single batch never repeats a board.
Generate and Export
- Set Quantity in the header panel above the tabs.
- Generate. Every run produces each puzzle together with its matching answer key.
- Check the preview.
- Choose your output destination and tick the formats you want, then export.
Available output:
- Print and image — JPG, PNG, SVG and PDF, at every edition. SVG is the one to reach for when a puzzle is going into a layout tool, since it scales to any size without going soft.
- JSON and HTML output — Interactive add-on. Exports the puzzle as web data plus a ZIP for the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin, so the puzzle becomes playable on your own site. In the player, the solver clicks and drags to draw loop segments, taps to clear, and can check their work against the pearl rules.
- Puzzle Slides — Interactive add-on. An interactive PowerPoint deck where the solver drags loop pieces from a six-piece palette onto the board.
Make a Whole Book
This is where one setup becomes a product. Two multipliers do the work.
Time Saver (Productivity) builds a batch from rows, each row carrying its own board size and difficulty — so a graded book is just a set of rows. Time Saver’s Add Progression button fills them in for you: Masyu ramps on two axes, square board size (5 to 12, defaulting to 6 → 10) and the four difficulty bands, so a 100-puzzle book that opens at 6 × 6 Easy and finishes at 10 × 10 Expert is a single dialog rather than forty row edits. See How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
Puzzle Book Studio then assembles that set into a finished, print-ready interior — pages, margins, trim size, titles and the answer-key section, in one pass. Instant Puzzle Books, available from Lite up, does the simpler version: a book PDF straight from your current settings. See Puzzle Book Studio Tutorials.
One set, every language market. Masyu carries no words and no numbers, so a generated set ships unchanged into every language edition — no translation, no relayout, no reading level to match. For a catalogue built on reuse, that is about as cheap as content gets.
For a classroom, a 6 × 6 Easy set is the right first lesson: print the answer keys separately, and step through one board together on screen with Puzzle Slides before letting students loose on the rest.
Use Your Own Pearl Artwork (Creative and above)
The Images tab replaces the drawn discs with pictures of your own — sun and moon, two brand icons, seasonal art, anything with two clearly distinguishable states.
- Tick Use images instead of the black and white pearls.
- Drop an image into Black pearl, White pearl, or both. Each side is independent, so you can replace only one and leave the other as a drawn disc.
- Clear removes an image and restores that disc.
Pick images that stay readable at print size and that a solver can tell apart at a glance — the whole puzzle depends on distinguishing the two kinds. An imaged pearl sits directly on the cell rather than on a circle, so artwork with its own outline usually looks best.
The choice carries through everywhere: print, the answer key, and the online player all show your artwork.
On Lite, the Images tab is still there but its controls are switched off, with a line explaining that the feature starts at Creative. A preset built at Creative keeps its artwork settings when opened at Lite — nothing is lost, it just isn’t applied.
Restyle the Board
The Style tab has five surfaces:
- Canvas — the page background.
- Cell fill — the inside of every cell.
- Grid line — the light grid the pearls sit on.
- Pearl outline — the ring drawn around both kinds of pearl.
- Solution loop — the colour and thickness of the loop on the answer key.
The defaults are a white canvas with a light grey grid and a blue solution loop. For print, thickening the grid line or dropping its contrast changes the whole character of the page; for a themed book, restyling the loop colour to match your cover is a one-click change.
Two things the Style tab does not offer. There is no Sketch (jitter) control — Masyu renders every line solid, so the setting would have nothing to do. And the pearl fills themselves are not editable: the black disc and the white disc keep their colours, and the outline is the only pearl surface you can restyle. If you want coloured pearls, use the Images tab.
The general styling workflow is the same on every module: How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro.
Set the Title
Titles are set on the Layout tab. Masyu offers twelve options, and the same list also feeds the Description field (whose module default is “Draw one closed loop: straight through the white pearls, turning on the black ones.”). Custom is first in the list and is what you get if you change nothing. Examples below are what each option resolves to for an 8 × 8 Medium board:
- Custom — your own free text
- Masyu — e.g. “Masyu”
- Masyu Grid Size — e.g. “Masyu 8 × 8”
- Masyu Difficulty — e.g. “Masyu Medium”
- Masyu Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Masyu 8 × 8 Medium”
- Pearl Logic — e.g. “Pearl Logic”
- Pearl Logic Grid Size — e.g. “Pearl Logic 8 × 8”
- Pearl Logic Difficulty — e.g. “Pearl Logic Medium”
- Pearl Logic Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Pearl Logic 8 × 8 Medium”
- Grid Size — e.g. “8 × 8”
- Difficulty — e.g. “Medium”
- Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “8 × 8 Medium”
The product is sold as “Masyu – Pearl Logic”, but the two names are offered separately here on purpose: the hyphenated form reads badly as a heading printed above a puzzle. Pick whichever name your book uses and stay consistent across the run.
How the title mechanism itself works — the substitution, where it appears, how it flows into books — is the same on every module: How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro.
Outcome
You now have a set of Masyu puzzles with matching answer keys, styled and titled, ready for print, for a book, or for your website. Each one has exactly one solution and can be solved by deduction alone.
FAQ
Which edition do I need to batch-create Masyu puzzles?
Productivity. Time Saver comes from the Productivity tier, not from the Interactive add-on, so Creative Interactive does not include it.
Do I need Creative to make the harder boards?
No. Every board size and every difficulty band is available at Standard. The only feature above Standard that changes the puzzle page itself is replacing the pearls with your own artwork.
What formats can I export?
JPG, PNG, SVG and PDF at every edition. The Interactive add-on adds JSON and HTML output for online play, plus Puzzle Slides.
Does Masyu have an Interactive PDF?
No, and it is not planned. A Masyu answer is a loop drawn on the edges between cells rather than a value typed into each cell, so a PDF form layer would have nothing meaningful to capture. Online play and Puzzle Slides both work well for this puzzle.
Why can’t I choose 11 × 11?
Because a grid with two odd sides cannot be covered by a loop completely, and above 9 a side those boards stop generating reliably — an 11 × 11 succeeded in only 12% of sampled attempts. The dropdown lists the boards that were measured generating every time. Boards with at least one even side go all the way to 12 × 12.
Can I regenerate the same set of puzzles later?
No. The desktop Creator has no seed control, so every run produces a fresh set. Archive your exported puzzle and answer-key images as soon as a batch is generated.