Guessing is not fun

I’m pretty hooked on this game. 4x4 doesn’t really do it for me, too simple, the only real challenge is beating the clock. So I play 8x8, where there aren’t that many immediately obvious moves.

But here’s the thing that gets to me. Not every board gives you moves you can actually reason your way to. Sometimes the numbers get you there cleanly: you can tell a given row can’t have 3 reds, so that cell has to be red. Fine. Sometimes you hang onto 2–3 numbers and look a few moves ahead to find a conflict, which tells you whether the cell at the start of the chain is red or blue. Still satisfying.

But when the chain you need is 4-5+ moves deep, that stops being deduction and starts being brute force. And when there’s no logical way to find the next move at all, so you just place something at random and hope it works out 6 steps later — that’s not fun.

Am I missing something?