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How to Play

In Pair Place, your goal is to place a letter in every square of the grid. However, there are two restrictions on how letters can be placed:

  1. Each letter may only appear in each column once.
  2. The letters must be placed two at a time into a pair of squares in the same row. Each of the two squares will be filled with the "header letter" of the other square; the top row of the grid is a "header" row that assigns a "header letter" to each column.

To place letters in the grid, press on the first square you want to fill, then drag to another open square in the same row. This will fill each square with the other square's header letter.

Tips

Although there are only two rules, you may need to think a few moves ahead to avoid painting yourself into a corner where you will become unable to make a move. There are a few rules of thumb that you can use to quickly figure out where you can make placements.

  • A square must not be filled with a letter if:
    • The letter already appears in the square's row.
    • The letter already appears in the square's column.
  • A square must be filled with a letter if:
    • Only two blank squares remain in the row; in this case, each must be filled with the other's header letter.
    • The square is the only blank square in the column, and that letter is the only letter that does not appear in the column.
    • That letter does not appear in that square's column yet, but that letter already appears in every other row where the column is open.

This is not a full list of all of the tricks that can be used to speed up the process of solving a puzzle. You will discover additional shortcuts on your own, but these cover many of the basic cases that you'll encounter.