Build a chain of small deductions

Each step needs its own reason

A useful chain may start with a line lock, remove candidates, create a single, place a cat and then create another single. No individual step needs to reveal the final arrangement. The strength of the chain comes from maintaining a correct candidate set after each action.

Write down why the first removal is valid before using its consequences. If the first step was only a guess, several later forced-looking moves do not make the whole argument proven.

Reason about every possible position

Sometimes a group has two or more candidate cat positions and another cell touches all of them. Wherever the group’s cat eventually goes, that cell would be adjacent to it. You can exclude the common neighbor without choosing the cat first.

This is the unit-neighbors rule in GridMew’s verified traces. It uses the actual candidate coordinates, not a visual guess about nearby regions. The worked step below includes the earlier state needed to check those candidates.

Review the chain in order

The complete worked example preserves the sequence. Expand the solution only after following the exclusions and placements; an answer diagram alone cannot show which deduction was justified at the time.

On your own board, the staged hint first identifies where to look. Read its explanation, compare it with the current cells, then choose whether to apply it. You can keep solving yourself instead of automatically revealing the rest of the chain.

A real step from gm-8-0001