By Nick
We have a new game. It's called Cats & Dogs, and it's free to play every day. If you play Tango on LinkedIn, you already know how it works. The rules are the same. The squares just have cats and dogs in them instead of suns and moons.
We built it because a lot of you asked for more. LinkedIn gives you one Tango a day. Once it's done, it's done, and yesterday's board is gone. Cats & Dogs gives you three new boards every day, as many extra boards as you want, and every past board we have ever published.
How it works
You get a 6×6 grid with a few animals already in place. Your job is to fill every empty square with a cat or a dog. There are three rules.
- No three in a row. You can't have three cats or three dogs next to each other, across or down. Two is fine.
- Half and half. Every row and every column has three cats and three dogs.
- Follow the signs. An = between two squares means they hold the same animal. A × means they hold different ones.
That's all of it. Here's a solved row, so you can see the rules at work:
Every board has exactly one answer, and you can reach it by logic alone. You never have to guess. If you feel stuck, there is always a square you can work out from what's already on the board. Finding it is the fun part.
If you want the full rules with more examples, our guide to LinkedIn's Tango covers them square by square. Everything in it works the same way here.
Three boards a day, and more when you want them
Each day brings three new boards: Easy, Medium and Hard. Easy is a good warm-up. You can finish it with the basic moves. Hard needs you to look further ahead, but it still never needs a guess.
Finished all three and want another? Try Endless mode. It deals you a fresh board at your level each time you finish one. Play one, or play twenty.
Missed a day, or want to try last week's Hard again? The archive keeps every board we have published. Nothing expires.
Help when you want it, and only then
Some puzzle games flash a square red the moment you make a mistake. We don't. Cats & Dogs doesn't flag mistakes while you play, because finding your own mistake is part of solving.
When you do want help, two buttons sit under the board:
- Check circles anything that's wrong. It doesn't fix it for you.
- Hint shows the next square you can work out, and tells you why. You learn the move instead of just getting the answer.
Use them as often as you like. They're there to get you moving again, not to keep score against you. If you want to get better at the moves Hint keeps showing you, we wrote up the seven mistakes that slow most players down, and every technique is in our Tango strategy guide. Stuck on a board from somewhere else? The Tango solver explains it step by step.
Free, with no app and no account
Cats & Dogs runs in your browser, on your phone or your computer. There's nothing to install, and you don't need an account to play.
If you do make a free account, it keeps your streak and your best times. Your streak counts any of our four games: Star Battle, Queens, Slidesmith and Cats & Dogs. Play one of them on a given day and your streak lives on.
One note to be clear about: we're not part of LinkedIn and we don't publish their daily answers. Cats & Dogs is our own game, with our own boards, built on a puzzle that has been around for years under names like Takuzu and Binairo. If you're curious about where it came from, we wrote about the puzzle's many names.
Tell us what you think
Cats & Dogs is brand new, and we want to know how it feels. Are the boards too easy? Is Hard too hard? Is a sign hard to see on your phone? After every board there are feedback buttons. Tap one, it takes a second. If you'd rather write, email us at [email protected].
We read everything. Our last game, Slidesmith, changed a lot because of what players told us, and we expect this one to do the same.