Cell quest

How to play Cell quest

The sheet looks like a budget review, but it plays like a mine-clearing logic puzzle. Tap a cell to audit it. Clean cells show a number: how many of the eight surrounding cells hide a budget leak. Use those numbers to work out where the leaks are, flag them with a right-click (or a long-press on your phone), and reveal every clean cell to pass the audit. Hit a leak and the cell errors out with a #REF! and the audit fails. The sheet tabs at the bottom switch difficulty, from the small Q1 audit to the giant Q3 one, and the Forecast tab hides a bonus merge puzzle where you swipe to combine equal revenue figures.

Tips

• Your first click is always clean, so start anywhere you like
• A 1 with only one hidden neighbour tells you exactly where the leak is
• Flag mode in the toolbar lets you flag with a normal tap, handy on a phone
• Q1 is a coffee-break audit, Q3 is a whole afternoon of plausible deniability

About Cell quest

Cell quest is a mine-clearing logic puzzle wearing a very convincing office disguise. The whole screen is styled like a generic spreadsheet: formula bar, column letters, row numbers, sheet tabs, even a decorative menu bar. Inside the grid, classic mine-hunting rules apply, except the mines are budget leaks and blowing up means booking a #REF! error. The numbers are formatted like ledger values and the flag is a little red corner marker, so from three desks away it reads as slightly stressful accounting work. Three sheet tabs give you three board sizes, and a fourth Forecast tab hides a number-merging puzzle for when you want a different kind of fake work. There is no timer and no sound. Just you, the grid and the quiet thrill of gaming on company time.

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