Campfires is a square meadow cut into patches of tent cloth — the camps — and one evening's worth of fires to light in it. There is no arithmetic and no luck: every board has exactly one answer, and you can reach it from the shape of the camps by reasoning alone.
The rules
The meadow has as many camps as it has rows. Light one campfire in every row, one in every column and one in every camp — and keep them apart: no two fires may touch, not along a side and not at a corner, or the sparks would jump. That is the whole of it. When the last fire is lit with nothing in conflict, the board is solved; there is nothing to submit.
The corner rule is the one that catches people. Two fires one step apart on a diagonal are touching — and so are two fires side by side, which the row and column rules already forbid.
Ash and fire
- Tap once for ash — a small cross that means "no fire here".
- Tap again for a fire.
- Tap a third time to clear the square.
- Drag from an empty square to ash every empty square you pass over — one stroke, and one Undo takes it all back.
Auto-ash marks everything a fire rules out the moment you light it — its row, its column, its camp and the eight squares around it — in a fainter cross. Lift the fire and its ash lifts with it. It is on by default for Easy and Medium and off for Hard, and you can switch it either way at any time. A fire that breaks a rule glows; in free play you can hide that and find your own mistakes, while the Daily always shows it.
On a keyboard: the arrows move a cursor, Space cycles the square, X ashes it, F lights it, Backspace clears it, Z undoes, H asks for a hint and A switches auto-ash.
Hints
Free play gives you three hints a board. A hint only points — it never moves anything for you. If one of your fires is in the wrong place, the hint rings that square with a dashed ring so you can clear it; otherwise it rings the square where the next fire belongs, the one a careful player would find next. Either way the board is no longer a clean solve: a hinted board posts no time to the leaderboards and earns none of the no-hint badges. The Daily has no hints at all, so everyone's time there is a fair comparison.
The levels
Difficulty is not only the size of the meadow. Every board is solved first by a program that works the way a person does, cheapest deduction first, and the hardest deduction it needs is the board's level. No board at any level needs a guess.
Easy — singles
A camp drawn entirely along one row (or column) owns that line's fire, so the rest of the line is ash. And a row, column or camp with one square left must have its fire there. Easy boards fall to those two ideas alone.
Medium — confinement
Look at what is left of a camp, not its whole shape: if a camp's open squares all lie in one row, that row's fire is the camp's, and every other square in the row is ash (and the same the other way round — a row whose open squares all sit in one camp clears the rest of that camp). Medium also asks you to spot a square whose fire would ash every open square of some other camp: that square can't be a fire.
Hard — pairs and short chains
Two camps whose open squares fit inside the same two rows own both of those rows' fires, so every other camp's squares in those rows are ash; three in three works the same way. And now and then you will need a short "what if": suppose a fire here, follow the forced moves a step or three, and if some row, column or camp is left with nowhere for its fire, the square was ash.
The Daily
Every day there are three new boards — an Easy, a Medium and a Hard — the same three for everybody in the world, turning over at midnight UTC. Each is a race against a countdown: five minutes for the Easy, ten for the Medium, twenty for the Hard. The clock runs only while you play; step away and it stops, and the meadow is covered so it can't be studied off the clock. In the last minute the clock turns coral.
Solve it in time and your finish time goes on that Daily's leaderboard (when you're signed in). If the clock reaches zero first, time's up: that board is a miss for the day — no leaderboard time, and your streak starts again tomorrow — and you can reveal where the fires were. Solving any of the day's three keeps your daily streak going. Free play has no clock to beat: it deals a fresh board at the level you choose, as often as you like.
Skins
The meadow can wear six looks. One is yours from the start; the other five are earned by playing — never bought — and each is shown in the settings with the feat it takes and how far along you are. Signed in, they follow your account to any device.
- Dusk Meadow The house look: earth-toned cloths on a charcoal ground. Free.
- Ember Glow Solve 10 boards — any level, free play or the Daily.
- Cold Ash Solve a Medium or Hard board without a hint.
- Prairie Noon Solve a Hard board. The one light, daylight skin.
- Lantern Night Solve a Daily seven days running.
- Aurora Cold Hands: solve a Hard with auto-ash off the whole way and no hint.
Achievements
Signed in, Campfires keeps eight badges for the game and five for its Daily:
- Kindling — solve a board. Ten Camps — solve ten. Fire Marshal — solve a hundred.
- No Sparks — a Medium or Hard without a hint. Big Country — a Hard. Cold Hands — a Hard with auto-ash off and no hint.
- Quick Match — an Easy in under 45 seconds, no hint. Three-Minute Hard — a Hard in under three minutes, no hint.
- The Daily: First Light, Spotless Daily (no fire ever in conflict), Week of Fires, Month of Fires and Camp Regular (25 Dailies solved).
Tips
Start with the small camps
A camp of two or three squares has few places for its fire, and any square that all of them touch or share a line with is ash.
Look for straight camps
A camp lying along a single row or column owns that line — ash the rest of it straight away.
Ash generously
Most of a solve is ruling squares out. Once enough of the meadow is grey, the fires tend to place themselves.
Count camps against rows
When two camps both fit inside the same two rows, those rows belong to them. It is the move that opens most Hard boards.
Where it comes from
Campfires belongs to the Star Battle family of placement puzzles, a staple of puzzle magazines and championships: stars instead of fires and regions instead of camps, with the same rules of one per row, column and region and none touching. This is the one-star kind, the simplest and quickest — dressed for an evening by the fire.
Good to know
- Boards are built on your device from a seed, so there's nothing to download and the Daily works offline once the page has loaded.
- Your games in progress, your settings, your skins and your streaks are kept on your device. Signing in adds the Campfires leaderboards and badges, and carries your skins to other devices; it's never required.
- Every board has one solution and can be solved without guessing. If you're stuck, there's a deduction waiting to be found.