Strategy and Hints

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This section contains helpful hints for playing Fathom It! successfully. As you play Fathom It!, you will undoubtedly discover new techniques, rules and tips that will elegantly solve even the toughest-looking boards.

ˇ You can learn rules for solving Fathom It! boards by observing the automatic solver.

ˇ Finalize your guesses as soon as possible. Fathom It! will fill in obvious squares with water, making it easier for you to solve the board.

ˇ Use the segment wildcard (i.e. the diamond-shaped ship segment) when you want to finalize a square to a ship segment, but you don't know which specific segment. Fathom It! will fill in as many obvious squares as it can.

ˇ Enable the Forgive Wrong Move feature when first playing Fathom It! until you feel comfortable with the mouse buttons and rules of the game.

ˇ Try first placing the largest ship not yet found. You will often find there is only one possible position to place it.

ˇ A middle ship segment (a square) must have segments on opposite sides. Check the row and column counts -- you can rule out any row or column with a count less than three.

ˇ Explore a hypothesis by toggling squares without finalizing them. If you reach a contradiction, you can either undo all guesses at once (by clicking the "Undo Guesses" button or choosing the "Undo Level n Guesses" menu option) or remove the guesses one-by-one (by pressing the BACKSPACE key).

ˇ You can toggle an entire row or column to water by double-clicking the coordinate or tally count of the row or column with the toggling mouse button.

ˇ Any guess that leads to too many of any one ship type is wrong. Be aware of the number of submarines at all times. This can be very useful in rejecting a guess.

ˇ No ship length can exceed the longest possible ship. For example, when solving a 10x10 board, a ship with five segments is not possible.

ˇ You can configure the scoring to reduce the penalties for hints and wrong guesses by reducing the hint penalty in the Customize Game dialog box. To totally remove the score box, select the Options | Display | Display Score menu item.

ˇ If you are playing Fathom It! in less than perfect surroundings (for example at school or at work), you can press ESC (also known as the BOSS key) to make the game instantly disappear from your screen. Fathom It! will become a minimized icon. You can restore Fathom It! to its normal size at any time by pressing ALT+TAB.