Fish Reef

Fish Reef is a winter fishing puzzle about deduction rather than luck. The lake is frozen over and the shoals beneath it cannot be seen. All you have is a sonar, an auger and a strictly limited number of moves before the light goes.

The ice is laid out as a grid of sixty three cells. Hidden underneath are several shoals, each one a straight run of neighbouring cells, and no two shoals ever touch. Your job is to open every fish cell before your moves run out.

A sonar ping costs one move and reports a single number, the count of fish cells inside the square around the spot you pinged, including the spot itself. That one number is everything. A reading of zero clears a whole square of ice at once. A reading of four in a corner narrows the possibilities down sharply. Two readings next to each other tell you which direction a shoal is running. Learning to triangulate from a handful of numbers is the whole game.

Drilling also costs a move. Drill on a fish cell and it goes on the ice. Drill on empty water and you have spent a move on nothing but cold. There is no penalty beyond the move itself, so aggressive drilling is a real strategy when the budget allows it, and careful pinging is the right answer when it does not. Markers are free and can be dropped anywhere to keep track of what you have worked out.

Twenty reefs run from a gentle two shoal opener to a crowded lake of six shoals, and the move budget tightens as the shoals get larger, so a strategy that carried you through the early reefs will not survive the late ones.

Coins earned from cleared reefs go into the gear locker. A long rope adds moves to every reef. Deep Echo widens the square that each ping reads. Marker Buoys spread a zero reading across the ice automatically. A Fish Finder gives you one free cell at the start. A Spare Auger pays for one drill each reef.

Nine achievements track your expeditions and a local sonar league ranks your points against nine other anglers.

Portrait only, fully offline, no purchases of any kind and no advertising. Settings contain a single option to clear your saved data.