What "expert" means here
Every board we publish is replayed by our solver, which scores the effort of each deduction it has to make. Anything scoring 8,000 or more is expert. Hard boards climb toward 8,000 by chaining counting arguments. Expert boards get there by needing a different class of move altogether: patterns that span three or four lines at once, bands treated as a single constraint, and stretches where the only way forward is to test a candidate and prove it impossible.
What expert does not mean is guessing. Every board here has exactly one solution and our solver confirms it is reachable by logic before release. The difference between an expert board and a badly made one is that the expert board always has a next move — it is just further away than you are used to looking.
One board a day, on its own track
Expert isn't a fourth daily so much as a separate track. The easy, medium and hard boards are released together each morning; the expert board has its own schedule, one per day, drawn from the top of the scale. That is deliberate. A board that might take an hour doesn't belong in the same sitting as three that take fifteen minutes between them, and most expert solvers treat it as a different ritual — the one you open in the evening, or leave up in a tab across the day.
It also means the expert archive grows by exactly one board a day, and every one of them is still there. If today's beats you, yesterday's is waiting.
The moves you need
Everything from the lower tiers, plus the three the expert board was built to demand.
1. Fish
Look at three rows at once. If their remaining candidate cells all fall in the same three columns, then six stars must fit in columns that can hold at most six — so those three columns are fully spoken for, and every other cell in them, in every other row, is an X. The pattern works with rows and columns swapped and with four lines instead of three. Fish are invisible if you read one line at a time; they only appear when you compare several.
1 Three rows have open cells only in the same three columns: six stars must squeeze into columns that hold at most six.
2 Those three columns are now fully spoken for, so their cells in every other row are X'd.
2. Virtual bands
Treat a strip of adjacent rows as one object. Three rows hold six stars; four hold eight. Total up what the regions caught entirely inside the strip must contribute, subtract, and you have an exact count of stars left for the cells poking in from outside — often zero, sometimes one, and either way a strip of the board resolves. On an expert board you may need to run this on three different strips before one gives.
The bottom three rows form a band holding exactly six stars. The two highlighted regions fit fully inside it and claim four — leaving just two stars for every other cell in the band, an accounting no single row reveals.
3. Disciplined lookahead
When every counting argument is exhausted, pick a candidate cell and ask: if this were a star, what would be forced? Follow the ring of X's and the completions it triggers for a step or two. If you reach a contradiction — a row that can no longer fit two stars, a region with no room — the candidate was never a star, and you mark it X with complete certainty. This is not guessing. A guess commits a mark you hope is true; lookahead commits only marks you have proved.
1 The second row is down to three open cells. Test a candidate: what if this cell held a star?
2 It would X out all three of those cells — the second row could no longer fit its two stars. Contradiction.
3 So the candidate can never be a star — mark it X. That's disciplined logic, not guessing.
See them fire on real boards: the Inkwell Stars walkthroughs and our own daily solutions name each advanced deduction at the exact step it happens. Reading three or four of those is worth more than any amount of theory.
A typical expert solve
Almost no opening, a long structured middle, and a cascade that arrives late — if you've earned it.
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1
The survey: map the structure
Expect no free marks. Spend the first minutes reading, not placing: which regions are tightest, which bands have no slack, where do three regions crowd into three rows. You are looking for the fish and the band before you look for a star.
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2
The long middle: structure, then arithmetic
Run the advanced moves in order of cost — bands first, then fish, then lookahead only where both have stalled. Every move produces X's, the X's squeeze regions into lines, the lines get claimed. It is slow, and it is supposed to be. Mark candidates freely; an expert board is solved on the X's.
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3
The finish: the late cascade
Somewhere in the last third the structure gives way and the rest falls in a rush that feels out of proportion to the effort before it. That contrast is the whole appeal of the tier. If it never comes, you've missed a structural move, not a mark — go back to the survey.
When you get stuck
You will be. On an expert board the question is how to be stuck productively:
- Notate. Mark every cell you have ruled out, even the obvious ones. Fish and bands only become visible on a board where the X's are complete; a single missing X can hide a whole pattern.
- Compare lines, don't read them. Take three rows with few open cells and lay their candidate columns side by side. If the columns repeat, you have a fish.
- Widen the band. Two rows, then three, then four. Then the same with columns. Expert boards routinely hide their key count in a four-line band.
- Test the tightest cell. If everything else is exhausted, take the most constrained open cell, assume it is a star, and follow the consequences two steps. A contradiction is a proof; write the X and move on.
- Leave it open. Expert boards are meant to be returned to. The archive keeps it, and so does your browser.
When you want the answer, the free step-by-step solution for each daily expert names every deduction. Read only up to the step you missed. On an expert board, that single step is usually a technique you'll use for the rest of your solving life.
Where to go from here
There is no tier above expert, so the road is sideways and backwards. Sideways: the Inkwell Stars walkthroughs replay another setter's boards one deduction at a time, which is the fastest way to meet advanced patterns you haven't seen yet. Backwards: the expert archive, one board per day since the tier began, and the printable Expert book, twenty of them on paper for a long train. Want to see how the same ideas play with one star instead of two? Our Queens hard boards are the natural companion. And if the expert tier is a stretch today, hard is where these techniques are first useful and still optional — the same rules, one notch less demanding.