Printable Skyscrapers Puzzles

Pick a side, a level and how many, and print. Boards go on one set of pages and the finished skylines on another, so a sheet cannot spoil itself.

What a batch of these looks like on paper

Six boards to a batch by default, two across a page, at a scale that leaves room to pencil four small heights into a lot and still read the numbers round the edge. Those numbers are the reason these print larger than a Latin square of the same side would: a rim printed at the size a sudoku gets away with is a rim nobody can read, and on this puzzle the rim is the entire clue set.

Solutions are pushed onto pages of their own instead of being tucked in beside the boards. A page holding a puzzle and its answer where both are visible at once cannot be handed to anybody, and it cannot really be solved either, because the eye finds the answer before the mind has finished reading the question.

Nothing on the page is an image. Every board is drawn as a real table by the same renderer that draws the one you play on, so it comes out at whatever resolution the printer runs at and stays crisp instead of turning into a grey approximation. On paper the rim numbers go to solid black rather than the screen’s softer grey, because a clue that reads as a shade darker on a monitor disappears entirely in economy mode.

Choosing what to print, and for whom

For a classroom or a waiting room, 4×4 easy is almost always right. It fits eight to a double-sided sheet, takes two or three minutes each, and needs nothing beyond reading the rim and filling the last gap in each line — which can be explained in about a minute, or handed over as the technique page if you would rather not do the explaining.

For a long journey, 5×5 at medium is the sweet spot. Large enough to take real time, small enough that a street can be held in the head, and blocked-height difficulty keeps a board moving without demanding a full set of pencil marks in every lot.

Print hard and expert at 5×5 or 6×6. A 4×4 expert exists and is generated honestly, but sixteen lots rarely give the both-ends argument anything to work with, and what usually comes back is a board graded hard instead. This puzzle rewards space in the way a crossword does.

A printed board is proved like any other

Printed boards come from the same generator as the ones on screen and are held to the same standard: exactly one grid satisfies the numbers, and it is reachable by argument at the level printed beside it. There is no second, sloppier path for paper.

That matters more on paper than anywhere else, because paper has no undo. A printed board with two answers wastes an afternoon and gives you no way to discover that the board was at fault rather than you — and on this puzzle the wrong answer will satisfy every number you happen to check.

Common questions

More Skyscrapers pages

• SkyscrapersUnlimited boards
• Daily skyscrapersA new skyline daily
• Skyscrapers rulesThree rules, shown
• Solving a skylineA 5×5, worked
• Skyscrapers techniquesThe whole ladder
• Reading the rimTechnique — easy
• SinglesTechnique — easy to medium
• Blocked heightsTechnique — medium
• Counting the lineTechnique — hard to expert
• Guessing at skylinesTechnique — refused here
• Skyscrapers archiveEvery past skyline