CombDoku is live on iPhone: a calm, hexagonal logic puzzle where territorial bears settle on a honeycomb. If you like deduction puzzles but want something gentler than a timer-driven arcade game, it’s built for you.
Updated October 5, 2026 for CombDoku 1.5. Since launch we’ve added weekly and all-time leaderboards, dark mode, about 2,000 campaign levels, fairer rewarded hints, and optional country flags on the leaderboards.
Two rules, deep boards
Every board is a honeycomb split into colored honey patches. Place bears so that:
- Every patch gets exactly one bear.
- No two bears share a comb lane in any of the three hex directions.
A comb lane is an unbroken run of tiles in one direction. Some boards have gaps, and a gap ends the lane, so bears on opposite sides of a gap don’t conflict. That’s the whole rulebook. On a hex grid, every neighboring tile already shares a lane, so there’s no separate “no touching” rule.
Tap once to leave a claw mark on a tile you’ve ruled out; double-tap to place a bear when you’re sure. Claw marks are free. A bear on the wrong tile costs one of your three hearts, even if it doesn’t break a visible rule yet, because every bear is checked against the board’s single solution.
Hexley the bear walks you through the two rules before your first board.
Every puzzle has exactly one solution, reachable by deduction alone. On some harder levels one bear is already placed for you, as a fair starting point. Our guide on how to play honeycomb sudoku walks through the solving techniques.
2,000 levels
The campaign has 2,000 levels: 600 come with the app and work offline, and the rest download when you’re online. Difficulty builds in a sawtooth, peaking every fifth and tenth level, and most later boards have 10 bears.
Daily Challenge
Every day there’s one shared board, the same for every player, drawn from a separate pack that never appears in the campaign. Retry as often as you like; once you solve it, it locks and you see how you rank against everyone who solved it that day. A new challenge arrives at 12:00 UTC.
Solve the Daily Challenge to see your standing among that day’s solvers.
Leaderboards and streaks
Campaign clears earn points on the Today, This Week and All-time leaderboards. The daily board resets at 00:00 UTC, and the top three each day win Hints and Reveals. Your leaderboard profile starts with a fun bear-themed name and avatar that you can change anytime, and a country flag set from your App Store country, which you can change or hide with “Prefer not to show.”
Separately, a daily streak rewards you for opening the app each day, with a Reveal on day 3 and Hints on days 5 and 7 of each seven-day cycle. CombDoku also has seven Game Center achievements.
Free to play, optional extras
- No sign-up. The app creates an anonymous leaderboard identity automatically, and your progress syncs through iCloud. The privacy policy explains what’s stored where.
- Hints and Reveals. A Hint explains the next logical step on your current board and previews it. A Reveal places a high-impact bear and claws every tile it rules out. You start with three of each.
- CombDoku+ ($1.99 a month or $11.99 a year in the US): unlimited Hints, no banner or interstitial ads, 15 Reveals a month, double Hints and Reveals from packs, 1.5× streak rewards and a badge on the leaderboards.
- Remove Ads ($2.99, one time) turns off banner and interstitial ads.
CombDoku is on iPhone (iOS 26.5 or later). An Android version is coming soon.