Lights Out Solution Guide: From Chasing Lights to Seven-Press Solves

Updated October 2026

Lights Out on this site is a five-by-five board where every press flips a small plus-shaped group of squares, and you win the moment every square is dark. It looks like a game of trial and error, but the board obeys simple algebra, and once you understand it you can solve any position with a fixed recipe. This guide covers what a press does, how the starting position is made, a reliable step-by-step method that never fails, and the pattern-reading skills that let you finish in far fewer presses when you are chasing a fast time.

How a press works, and why order never matters

Pressing a square flips it and its direct neighbours above, below, left and right. Diagonals are untouched. A press in the middle of the board therefore flips five squares, a press on an edge flips four, and a press in a corner flips only three, because the board does not wrap around.

Two properties follow from that rule, and every technique below depends on them. First, the order of presses is irrelevant: pressing A then B leaves the board in exactly the same state as pressing B then A. Second, pressing the same square twice is the same as never pressing it. A solution is therefore not a sequence but a set of squares, each pressed once. If you ever catch yourself pressing a square to undo a press you made a moment ago, you have spent two presses and two moments of clock for nothing.

How the puzzle is built

Each new board starts completely dark. The game then presses seven different squares at random and shows you the result. Because the squares are all different, the cancellation trick above cannot make the board collapse into something trivial, and in our simulation of 100,000 boards the shortest possible solution was seven presses in about 99.7 percent of them and five presses in the rest. In other words, there is almost always a seven-press answer: the same seven squares the game used to scramble it.

The number of lit squares you start with varies a lot. In our simulation it ranged from 3 to 22, most often 12 or 13. A board with many lights is not necessarily harder; it often just means the seven scramble presses were spread out and did not overlap.

Every board on this site is solvable, so you never have to wonder whether you are wasting your time on an impossible position.

What the score measures

Your result is the time between your first press and the press that turns off the last light, shown to a tenth of a second. Lower is better. The move counter is displayed during play and on the finish card, but the stored best and the Hall of Fame both rank time only. Fewer presses help only because each one costs time.

The important consequence is that the clock is not running while you look at a fresh board. It starts with your first press. Studying the position before you touch it is free, and on a fast solve that study is where most of the work should happen. The timer measures real elapsed time, so leaving the app mid-solve does not pause it.

The method that always works: chase the lights down

This recipe needs no insight at all, which makes it ideal while you are learning.

1. Sweep row one. For each lit square in the top row, press the square directly beneath it in row two. That press turns the top square off without touching any other square in row one.
2. Repeat downward. Now clear row two by pressing in row three under each lit square, then row three from row four, and row four from row five. When you finish, the top four rows are dark and any remaining lights sit in the bottom row.
3. Read the bottom row and press the top row. Only seven bottom-row patterns can remain. Each one tells you which squares of the top row to press, numbering the columns 1 to 5 from the left:
   • Lights in columns 1, 2, 3: press column 2 in the top row.
   • Lights in columns 3, 4, 5: press column 4.
   • Lights in columns 2, 4: press columns 1 and 4.
   • Lights in columns 1, 3, 4: press column 5.
   • Lights in columns 2, 3, 5: press column 1.
   • Lights in columns 1 and 5: press columns 1 and 2.
   • Lights in columns 1, 2, 4, 5: press column 3.
4. Chase again. The top-row presses re-light parts of the board. Sweep down exactly as before, and the second pass ends with every light off.

We checked this table against the game's own flipping rule, and every chased board in our 20,000-board test ended dark. The cost is efficiency: the method averaged about 19 presses in our simulation and occasionally needed more than 30, against an optimum that is usually seven. It is perfect for guaranteed finishes and a poor choice for record times.

Reading shapes to find the seven-press answer

To solve faster you have to recognise individual presses in the starting picture. Each scramble press left a footprint, and when footprints do not overlap they are easy to see.

• A plus sign of five lights in the interior is one press on its centre.
• A T of four lights along an edge is one press on the middle square of the edge.
• An L of three lights wrapped around a corner is one press on the corner itself.

Overlapping footprints are where the real skill lies, because a square flipped by two presses goes dark again. Two side-by-side presses each flip the other square, so both centres end up dark and you see a ring of six lights around a dark pair. Two diagonal presses share two neighbours, which cancel, and leave a pattern of six lights with a gap where the plus signs touch. Learning to see these ghost shapes is the same as learning to read the scramble backwards.

A practical approach is to identify one footprint you are sure about, mentally press it, and look at the board that would remain. If the leftover is simpler, you were right. Because order does not matter, you can collect all your confident presses first and leave the uncertain region for last, finishing with a short chase if you get stuck.

A note on equivalent solutions

The five-by-five board has a quirk worth knowing: there are three different non-empty sets of presses that change nothing at all, using 12, 12 and 16 squares. Combining any of them with a valid solution produces another valid solution, so every board here has exactly four press sets that solve it. Usually one of them has seven squares and the others are much longer. The chase method also tends to press some squares twice across its two passes, and each such pair is wasted. When a chase finishes with an oddly large move count, that is why; the result still counts, but the clock will show it.

A practice plan

1. Learn the chase method until the seven bottom-row cases are automatic. A guaranteed solve is the foundation for everything else.
2. Before each first press, spend a few seconds looking for single plus, T and L shapes. Press those first and chase the rest.
3. Start recognising the six-light shapes made by two neighbouring presses.
4. When you can usually spot all seven squares, plan the full set before touching the board, then press them in one smooth pass. That is how the fastest times are made.