What Is Choco Banana? Rectangles, Blobs, and Rules

What is Choco Banana?

What is Choco Banana asking you to do? You shade some cells and leave others white, and the shaded cells clump into connected groups. Each group falls into one of two camps decided by whether it holds a number. A group that contains a clue must be a rectangle, a neat choco, and the clue tells you exactly how many cells that rectangle holds. A group with no clue at all must be a banana, a shape that is deliberately not a rectangle. Balancing these two demands across a shared board is what gives Choco Banana its playful bite, since one careless shaded cell can turn a tidy rectangle into an illegal blob.

The rules of Choco Banana

• Shade some cells and leave the rest white; shaded cells connect edge to edge into groups.
• A group that contains a number must form a rectangle, including a square, and the number equals the count of cells in that group.
• A group that contains no number must not form a rectangle; its shape has to be irregular.
• Two different numbers cannot share one shaded group, since a rectangle has a single fixed size.
• White cells simply separate the groups and carry no shape requirement of their own.

Suppose a cell shows the number 4. Its shaded group must be a rectangle of exactly four cells, which means either a straight one-by-four line or a two-by-two square, and the surrounding walls usually decide which. Now look at a shaded clump elsewhere that holds no number; it must be a banana, so a plain two-by-two square there would be illegal and you must bend its shape, perhaps into an L of three or a zigzag. If shading one more cell would accidentally complete a rectangle around an unnumbered group, that shaded cell has to move. Reading the numbers as rectangle sizes while keeping the blank groups jagged is the constant balancing act.

Beginner tactics for Choco Banana

1. Treat a clue of 1 as a lone cell. A one-cell group is a one-by-one rectangle, so it must sit isolated by white on every side.
2. Factor the bigger numbers. A 6 can only be a one-by-six line or a two-by-three block, and the grid walls quickly narrow the choice.
3. Keep unnumbered groups irregular. Remember that a domino and any full rectangle are forbidden shapes for a clueless group.
4. Separate the numbers. If two clues sit close together, plan white cells between them so they never fall into one rectangle.
5. Grow from the edges. Cells against a wall or corner have fewer ways to extend, which helps lock a rectangle into place.

How Choco Banana compares to Sudoku

Sudoku is a numbers game of rows, columns and boxes, while Choco Banana never asks you to place a value at all; its few numbers only report the size of a rectangle. The real work is geometric, telling rectangles from non-rectangles and shading accordingly, which is a different muscle from Sudoku's digit tracking. Still, both puzzles promise one solution found by pure reasoning, and both punish the guess. If shaping tidy blocks is your idea of fun, you might enjoy Astro Blocks from SnailPixel, a bright puzzle game about fitting blocks together in space. And when you crave the classic grid, Shapedoku brings full Sudoku with nine glowing shapes instead of digits, free at app.shapedoku.com, with a solver and printable puzzles at shapedoku.com.