Lights Out
NEWWorks on both desktop and mobile. Tap or click to play.
About This Game
Play Lights Out free online. Tap cells to toggle the lights and turn the whole grid off. A classic, addictive logic puzzle.
How to play Lights Out
Objective: Turn every lit cell dark so the entire grid is off, using as few taps as possible.
Choose Easy, Medium, or Hard to start. Easy is a 4x4 grid, Medium is 5x5, and Hard is 6x6, and each button shows the exact size beside its name. The board loads already scrambled, with some cells glowing yellow and others dark. Your job is to switch off every glowing cell. Tapping any cell flips that cell plus the cells directly above, below, left, and right of it. Diagonal cells are never affected, and cells on an edge simply flip fewer neighbours.
Every tap counts as one move, shown in the Moves counter at the top. The tap that clears the last light is included, so a solve reported as eight moves means eight taps total. There is no timer, no move limit, and no penalty for extra taps, so you can experiment freely. The only pressure is the move count itself, since a lower number is a better result for that difficulty.
When the last light goes dark, a green Lights Out banner appears and the board locks so further taps do nothing. It shows how many moves you took. If that total beats your previous record for the current difficulty, it is saved as your Best and shown in green beside the Moves counter. Each difficulty keeps its own separate best score.
Use New Puzzle at any time to abandon the current board and generate a fresh scrambled grid at the same difficulty. Switching difficulty also generates a new board. Every puzzle is built by applying random valid taps to an all-off grid, so each one is guaranteed to have a solution, and a blank starting board is rejected so you always begin with at least one light on.
Tips and strategy
Tapping twice cancels out
Tapping the same cell twice returns the board to exactly where it started, wasting two moves. Since each tap flips a fixed set of cells, order does not matter either. Plan your set of cells and tap each one at most once.
Chase lights top down
Ignore the top row, then for every lit cell in it, tap the cell directly below. Repeat row by row down the grid. This chase method turns a whole board into fixing one row at a time until only the bottom row is left.
Fix the bottom by the top
After chasing lights down, the pattern stuck in the bottom row tells you which top-row cells to tap to finish. This is why a solve sometimes needs a top-row tap that briefly relights cells before everything clears on the next pass.
Restart for a lower best
Your Best only improves when you beat it, so a messy solve never hurts your record. Hit New Puzzle and retry the same difficulty repeatedly to hunt for a low move count with no downside for failing.
Frequently asked questions
Which cells does a tap change?
A tap flips the cell you clicked plus its four orthogonal neighbours: up, down, left, and right. Diagonal cells stay untouched. Cells along an edge or in a corner have fewer neighbours, so those taps flip fewer cells overall. Nothing else on the board changes with a single tap.
Is every puzzle actually solvable?
Yes. Each board is created by starting from an all-off grid and applying random valid taps, so a solution always exists by reversing those taps. The generator also rejects any grid that came out completely blank, so you always start with at least one light on and a real puzzle to solve.
How is my best decided in Lights Out?
Your best is the lowest number of moves used to clear a board at a given difficulty. When you solve a puzzle in fewer moves than before, the new total replaces your record and shows in green. Easy, Medium, and Hard each store their own separate best score.
Do my best scores survive closing the tab?
Yes, your best score for each difficulty is saved in your browser's local storage, so it stays between sessions on the same device and browser. Clearing your browser data or opening the game in a different browser will start you with no recorded bests.