How to Play Lights Out
Lights Out is an electronic puzzle game originally released by Tiger Electronics in 1995. The game presents a 5×5 grid of lights, some of which are turned on. Clicking any light toggles it and its four orthogonal neighbors (up, down, left, right). Your goal is to turn all the lights off. It sounds simple, but the interconnected toggling creates a deeply satisfying logic challenge that has been studied extensively by mathematicians using linear algebra over GF(2) — the field with only two elements.
How to Play
Click or tap any cell on the 5×5 grid. That cell and its direct neighbors (up, down, left, right — not diagonals) will all toggle: lit cells turn off, and dark cells turn on. Your objective is to turn off every single light on the board. The puzzle is always solvable — every starting configuration generated here has a valid solution. Three difficulty levels control how many initial random clicks scramble the board: Easy (5-8 clicks), Medium (10-14), and Hard (18-22).
History & Origin
Lights Out was created by Avi Olti and sold by Tiger Electronics in 1995. The handheld device had a 5×5 grid of buttons that doubled as lights, and it became one of the best-selling electronic puzzles of the 1990s. The mathematical foundations were studied even earlier — the concept of toggling with neighbors is equivalent to solving a system of linear equations in modular arithmetic. The puzzle has since appeared in many video games, escape rooms, and puzzle collections worldwide. Read our best puzzle games article for more like this.
Strategy & Tips
- Light chasing. The most well-known strategy: go row by row from top to bottom. For each lit cell in the current row, click the cell directly below it. This clears the top rows at the expense of the bottom row.
- Solve the bottom row. After light chasing, the bottom row may still have lights on. Use a lookup table: based on which bottom-row lights remain, click specific cells in the top row, then light chase again.
- Clicking a cell twice is the same as not clicking it. Every cell either gets clicked once or not at all in the optimal solution.
- Order doesn't matter. The final state depends only on which cells you clicked, not the order. This means you can plan all clicks in advance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is every Lights Out puzzle solvable?
Not every random 5×5 configuration is solvable, but all puzzles generated on MiniGamePlanet are guaranteed solvable because they are created by performing random clicks on an all-off board — which means the same clicks in reverse will turn all lights off.
What is the maximum number of clicks needed to solve any solvable 5×5 puzzle?
The maximum minimum solution for any solvable 5×5 Lights Out puzzle requires at most 15 clicks.
How is Lights Out related to math?
Lights Out can be modeled as a system of linear equations over GF(2) (the binary field). Each cell is a variable (clicked or not), and each cell equation says its resulting state must be 0 (off). Solving uses Gaussian elimination mod 2. This makes it a popular problem in discrete mathematics courses.
Play Lights Out free in your browser — no download needed. Toggle lights, think logically, and turn them all off.