When we set a Sunflowers garden, the rule we do not break is that somebody patient could finish it without ever choosing. Each number counts the flowers in the squares around it, and only those. If two plants both “could” be right and nothing on the grid distinguishes them, the garden is not finished, and it does not ship. How to play Sunflowers is the gestures and the counting. This note is the promise underneath them.
That promise is also a way to play. A square that feels like a guess is not a square asking you to be brave. It is a square whose information is still on another number. Planting it to see what happens is how a calm grid becomes a knot you have to unread. A wrong flower does not explode. It just makes several numbers lie at once, and the picture gets harder in exactly the way the puzzle was not designed to be.
The only moves that are ready
Count what is left, not what the number said at the start. If a number’s remaining count equals its remaining neighbours, those neighbours are all flowers. If the remaining count is zero, they are all empty. Anything between those two is not a plant yet. Zeros are the polite version of this. They hand you a ring of empties immediately, which is why they are the right place to begin, including on a day when they feel too obvious to bother with.
A faded number is the same fact, already checked. Tap it and fill what it has proved. Then look again at the numbers next door, because a filled ring often turns a neighbour from “maybe” into one of the two forced cases. The garden is a chain of those, not a picture you shade in from the middle.
The pencil is still not a guess
On Sunflowers Master the opening gives you less, and you will reach a point where two arrangements both look legal in one corner. The pencil is for that moment. Mark the branch that would force something else, and follow only that force. If a number ends up with too many flowers, or can no longer reach its count, throw the marks away. The break is the information. Keeping a layer you have not checked is guessing with a fainter ink.
The hint on a master garden is for when you are sure the next square is determined and you cannot see why. Using it is allowed. A clean solve is still the one that did not need it. The borders are where that solve usually starts. The middle looks ambiguous until the edges have removed a shape. We build them that way on purpose: the difficulty should be the length of the chain, not a coin flip hiding in the centre.