Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid

hexapipes.vercel.app

537 pointsgereleth161 comments

Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation.

I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So I did just that =).

I find hexagonal pipes a bit more difficult than the square variant because there's a larger variety of possible tile shapes. For an extra challenge I implemented wrap mode where the board can connect to itself (right to left and top to bottom), so there are no convenient outer walls to start from.

The site is made with Svelte Kit, its code is available on github at <https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes>.

Hope you enjoy playing =).

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Make a daily one where everyone has the same game for the day and you can share your scores and my entire friend group would play along with the other ones we do like Wordle and NYT Mini Crossword. Let me know if you add this!

Agree, this is what can really push it. A daily 5x5 w/ easily shareable scores is the way you can bring this to a lot of people.

Or, a daily 5x5, 7x7, etc. for the true addicts

Absolutely. I haven't been pulled into a puzzle like this in awhile. I'd pay a very modest amount for an app

You might enjoy an existing app called Infinity Loop. It's a similar puzzle game using the traditional square puzzle-piece shape.

@OP, you could consider adding it to Rune which adds daily challenges incl. daily leaderboards with 1 line of code: https://github.com/rune/rune-games-sdk#daily-challenges-opti...

Full disclosure: I’m CTO at Rune, but I genuinely think it might be fun and easy for you to do. Here’s a similar popular game on Rune: https://app.rune.ai/untangle-H-vghwxUfO

Plumble?

Great game!

I humbly suggest that you flesh out the rules just a bit more. I struggled to figure out if pipes were allowed to run out of bounds, whether they all had to be connected into a single network, and the significance of the bulb-ended ones. I'm not totally dense and could make some guesses, but this still made the puzzle less than approachable for me at first. Basically I just guessed at these things, tried to see if I could solve one, and once I did and saw my complete solution all was clear. But why not state these things up front? Or maybe that's part of the puzzle? :-)

My first solve took 9min, then 3, then 1.5min for my third.

This was exactly the same for me. I wasn't sure if all pipes had to be water tight or not. Once I understood what the actual constraints were I could solve the next ones quicker.

Fair enough, I'll think how to word all this.

- All sections must be connected into a single, contiguous network. - The whole network is contained in the grid, and no pipes may run outside the grid. - Bulb-shaped pipes with a single connection are terminations (dead-ends).

I'll agree with other commenters that actually just showing a complete solution is better. Or both!

I think simply having an image of what a solved network looks like would help a lot.

Agreed, I didn’t bother reading the rules and just started clicking. I doubt I would read the rules even if they were written perfectly.

a pic of a before and after puzzle would answer these questions intuitively as well.

Those kinds of edge cases can be easily overlooked by people that play a lot of these types of puzzle games. Great feedback.

Captivating! So, while generating the puzzle, you are essentially creating a random Spanning Tree for the given nodes (hexagon) arrangement? Then you randomize each pipe piece's direction within a hexagon?

What algorithm are you using for it Spanning Tree?

I have been working on Maze Generation[0] and found randomized Prim's, Kruskal's to be useful for Spanning Tree creation but the good old Depth First Search increases the difficulty of solving a Maze.

[0] https://github.com/emadehsan/maze/blob/main/media/hexagonal....

Well the way I wrote my pipes solver was to keep a set of possible orientations of every tile and gradually remove impossible options by using border conditions and some heuristics like avoiding islands and loops. And when this doesn't turn up any new info I resort to depth-first search.

The generator basically does the same but every tile starts out with a full set of possible orientations - every rotation of every tile shape (there are 62 I think). I remove some orientations due to border conditions, then pick a random possible orientation for some tile and so on till the board is filled. There usually is some backtracking involved.

This isn't terribly efficient and can get stuck for quite long when generating large puzzles. I actually want to look into adapting maze generation algorithms for creating these puzzles, so thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

I see. Amazing work you have done! This game is enticing.

My understanding is that since the game mentions:

"Rotate the tiles so that all pipes are connected with no loops."

These is exactly what a Spanning Tree is. So, any spanning tree generation algorithm would do. You just generate a random ST each time and cut this tree where the hexagon borders intersect with it (to get pipe pieces) and randomize their orientation.

These algorithms are not going to disappoint you in terms of performance.

I made tutorials on the topic as well. Might help me clear my point: https://youtu.be/d5yzKkG1n1U?t=36

Apologies for spamming. Sorry, if I'm suggesting premature optimization.

There might still be issues with multiple solutions... Because when a board has multiple solutions they're all valid Spanning Trees. But there probably is some way around this.

An efficient generator could perhaps even work client side, so I wouldn't have to store premade puzzle instances in the repo. That would be cool =).

Could perhaps look into the source of Simon Tatham's variant? Those are generated client side.

Neat. The multiple colors for groups is another innovation beyond SGT's Net.

You might consider implementing the traditional 3 mouse button controls (rotate left, mark correct, rotate right). If you can keep the Firefox context menu from popping up.

Maybe there's a way to support wrapping, and help the player understand which edge wraps to which? Maybe affecting the shape?

Related: 5 days ago "Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (greenend.org.uk)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170592

Mm, middle button, why didn't I think of it.

My wrap puzzles show an infinite tiled grid, so there shouldn't be questions about which edge wraps where. There are no edges, tiles just start repeating after a while. Maybe I didn't understand your question about wrapping?

A "click and hold" to lock a tile into place would also be great and mobile accessible

It already does that on mobile. It allows marking edges as connecting or not, and locking tiles with a long press.

I found the edge marking on mobile to just be a random source of confusion. Kept doing it by accident.

Sorry about this. I sometimes place them accidentally too.

I have an idea of placing them with some kind of gesture - like touch and drag between tiles. That wouldn't interfere with tapping to rotate tiles. But on the other hand, I'm usually zoomed in on mobile and I use touch and drag to move around. Interfering with that would be bad too.

I'm open to ideas for better controls.

I don't know how I missed that post but thanks a ton!

This will scratch my nostalgia itch for a good while.

I liked it, but I've got a funny thing about being timed. It stresses me out and makes a game that should be relaxing completely unenjoyable. I've heard others say the same to me often, so I know I'm not alone. Although there are clearly plenty of other folks who do like the added pressure of a timer. If you had a mode that completely turned off any times, I'd actually keep playing.

It's not like the timer is counting down and the game ends when the timer runs out. The timer is going up. There's no pressure, you can ignore it (or even write a script that hides it client side).

> you can ignore it

No can do. Psychology is a funny thing.

> or even write a script that hides it client side

Sure, or just update the code and host it myself. I was just making a casual comment, which the author is free to casually ignore.

Oh come tf on, you can quite easily just view source and hide the timer, GP even was nice enough to make his code nice and tidy with easy to recognize names. Just ctrl-f timer.

It's not like you are having to rewrite his game.

Your edge-case psychological issue should be worth GP rewriting his game, when you couldn't be bothered to change some CSS in two seconds.

It's not an edge case. Perfectly reasonable suggestion for the author.

It defines edge case.

Thanks for the feedback. I already promised to add timer hiding option in another comment thread, will do on the weekend.

Very cool! I suggest adding a daily puzzle with a share result (day number and how long it took to solve) like all the games in the wordleverse do. My spouse and I would enjoy doing one daily and sending our results to each other.

Good idea! I'm already thinking of how to implement... I really need another vacation or two, lol

Hehe. If you’d like, you could add it to Rune which adds daily challenges incl. daily leaderboards with 1 line of code: https://github.com/rune/rune-games-sdk#daily-challenges-opti...

Full disclosure: I’m CTO at Rune, but I genuinely think it might be fun and easy for you to do. Here’s a similar popular game on Rune: https://app.rune.ai/untangle-H-vghwxUfO

Me: "Oh I'm pretty good at Net, this should be easy" Two hours later I finally finish the 40x40.

Thank you and I hate you. I've infected my friends with this.

Also, since we're bragging about scores: 39s for the 5x5 wrapping, but I'll definitely be coming back to this.

Yeah, it was quite different. Half the strategies for grid-net doesn't work, and my pattern matching is off.

Same for Loopy/Slitherlink. It's the same game, but changing shapes vastly changes the game. Very fascinating and refreshing.

I remember being pretty mad at how a straight piece isn't immediately solved after you fix one wall. Like how can it still have wiggle room?! =))

All general principles still apply though, so experience with Net certainly helps here.

Exactly the same I was thinking off! Normally a straight piece will propagate and lock all other straight pieces either into it or parallel with it. But yeah, still gain some information, while the neighbor straight isn't locked at all times, it's at least constrained. So very cool to play the same game I already like, but with some new twists. :)

Edit: I like how I can mark known edges. So many digital puzzle games make it hard to mark the same stuff I would on a paper.

Wow, did you really start with a 40x40? I only solved like two of them ever. It's pretty time consuming).

And good time on the wrap! Small wrap boards can actually be harder than larger ones because there's less chance of finding some seed tiles to start from.

I did a couple of 5x5 to warm up and learn the strategies, but then went off the deep end. The middle was rough, but the ending part got me into the same meditative state that regular Net does, so I'd call that a win!

Also did a 40x40 in two and a half hour

After playing for a bit, I started to wish for a way to mark cells as done. Then I soon realized it was already implemented, as a right click. Unfortunately, right clicking on my Apple Magic Mouse is notoriously unreliable, so instead I developed an interesting new approach to solving.

I force myself to fix each cell as I scan the board from top to bottom, left to right. I thus have to visualize how my choices unfold downward, in search of clues, or ideally proofs, for how best to proceed. This manner of play reminds me a bit of the "reading" one does in the game of Go to explore variations before placing one's stone.

I hope other people find this more constrained version of interest as well...

What are the green/red lines that appear when you click the junction between two hexes?

(really fun game btw, I will have to return to this later. I'm looking forward to sharing this with my 8 year old who's fascinated with logic puzzles.)

Those are edge marks, they let you mark some edges as "definitely a wall" or "definitely a connection". It sometimes helps in harder puzzles).

Love it!

I first played the version of this with squares on a Palm Pilot and that was a long time ago. I was even looking for that version for my iPhone the other day but was drowning in other random games (and little network tools) until I gave up.

It shouldn’t take much effort to turn it into a PWA, so then people can use it just like an app. I already saved it to my Home Screen and would certainly play this as a daily puzzle, just like Wordle. Keep up the great work.

This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170592

This is super fun! Just played a few and my best on the 5×5 was 0:42. Thanks for sharing!

Love your description too—would love to see a more in-depth write up if you get the time! It's so fun when you can flip from solving something to generating it. I'm also a fan of solving games with code and have made an Upwords bot that plays perfectly but realized I could use it to try to find better "hyperparameters" for the game (like how many points certain bonuses are) by getting it to play itself and having some metric of what a better game would be. Though as you can probably tell from the lack of a link I have yet to do that part.

my first 5x5 try was 0:58. I was actually very surprised when it came together as it felt like i was just randomly fitting pipes to their nearest neighbors.

Yes, much like falling asleep, falling in love, or going bankrupt this was quite the "slowly, then all at once" type of affair.

Is there always a single possible solution ? (I did a bunch of small ones and always found a solution pretty quickly)

if the pipes are cut from a Spanning Tree connecting all the hexagons (like the one you witness once you have solved), then yes, for those give pipe pieces, there should be only one solution.

Is this true? I can almost imagine one puzzle that can create two different spanning trees. Maybe I ought to draw it up to verify.

Spanning trees may be required but not sufficient for a unique solution.

You are right. It is possible that branches (pipes) cut from one Spanning Tree might be re-arrangeable into a different Spanning Tree.

All puzzles on the site have a unique solution At least my solver thinks so)). Configurations with multiple solutions are possible, but I weeded those out when generating.

Solved my first 5x5 in 1:54. At first I thought it would be really difficult but then I found a hex which could only go one way (a corner hex with V shape) and then from there the adjacent pipes could only orient one way. There were a few times where I had to think down a tree of possibilities (if this hex goes like this, then this hex can't possibly fit here because of a previously solved hex, therefore it must go like this instead), but never more than one or two steps. All in all it's a very satisfying puzzle format.

I have a minor nitpick to share. I’d like it if there was an option to hide the timer, because being under time pressure to solve a puzzle can stress me out. Overall, it’s a fun puzzle, though!

Thanks for sharing, I'll add that option (on the weekend most likely).

I'd like an opposite option.. where the timer runs out :-) maybe with a neat graphics of water flowing from the bulb starting point(s)

You would enjoy Ant Run, which I played for hours on end in the late 90s. https://www.dosgames.com/game/ant-run. There is a browser-based emulator available here.

I knew this game as Pipe Dream / Pipe Mania!

Puzzle 850 (10x10) appears to be unsolvable? After fixing the rest of the tiles, I was left with a scrambled area in the top-middle with 3 loose ends. Even if the affected tiles were all adjacent and shape-compatible (no on both counts), there's no way to pair up 3 ends that doesn't leave one out.

My frustration with wasting time (23 hours; I slept on it) on an unsolvable puzzle is somewhat mitigated by the fact the problem taught me this: if you count the free ends and come up with an odd number, you can know immediately that the puzzle isn't solvable, without rotating any tiles. An even number doesn't prove the puzzle is solvable, but an odd number definitely indicates a problem.

Edit: Nevermind; there was a 4th loose end I was overlooking. Finding it led to getting unstuck & the puzzle was solvable after all.

Unfortunately due to the way the site works, I don't seem to be able to get a new 10x10 puzzle by refreshing the page? So I'm stuck on the unsolvable one. I can imagine saving the progress is a feature, but you should also add a "pass" or "skip" button. Oh - I just realized I can "hack" it by manually changing the number in the URL to something else, e.g. /10/851.

Before I realized the puzzle was unsolvable I was also looking for a button to randomize/reset the initial tile positions. I was thinking maybe I wasn't seeing the solution due to my preconceived ideas from already-placed tiles. That wouldn't have helped here, but maybe on a solvable one being able to re-randomize would help a player get unstuck.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm very sure all puzzles on the site are solvable. But a skip button makes total sense when one hits a deadend. I'll work it in when I have the time.

With a randomize button do you mean a complete reset to initial state? Or something like keep the locked tiles, reset the rest?

+1, a reset button would be great, to go back to initial state entirely. Sometimes you know you've stuffed up the logic on the puzzle and seeing it fresh is the best option. I found myself searching for the button as well.

Why are the SVG tiles specified to 599.99999999 instead of 600 or something? I think a SVGO optimizations run would reduce the size of the assets a tad.

I would guess that the assets were made in Inkscape or comparable software where you work visually and don't actually look at the generated code.

There aren't really any assets though. I just create the svgs dynamically. Maybe I need to place some strategic `Math.round` calls here and there, never thought of this =).

Yeah so if you can math.round or math.floor them a bit the paths are a lot cleaner - if you're dynamically creating them anyway though then I don't know that it gains you much performance. It might gain some performance on render for larger maps? Not sure.

Didn't get a chance to look at your source.

The file to look at would be this Tile component: https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes/blob/main/src/lib/puzz...

My svg handling was very much "learn as I go". An earlier version even had circles instead of hexagons because they're simpler to do. There's a cool playthrough video of that version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlpPr485NUY

Reminds me of this game, Entanglement, that I used to play a bunch ~10 years ago. It showed up as a "Chrome App" (when that used to be a thing back then, lol, Google killed those off). Interesting scoring system.

https://entanglement.gopherwoodstudios.com/en-US-index.html

Nice I was addicted to this exact game on a mobile app many years ago. Thanks so much for making the source code available! Gonna be fun to dig into it

Edit: found the app, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodles/id967624193

Looks like they have a sequal to it and it includes a triangle grid!

The app is from the same creator

I love it! I loved this game I used to play one on Android (square version). Told the dev I would even pay for it. It got very popular and then after a while it started to get ads. At that point I uninstalled it.

PS: Make a start button instead of starting on load. Also the other game had a hypnotic looping music. Which could be put off.

This is fantastic. A true joy to play! I am seconding the suggestion that you make a daily challenge like Wordle, with the feature to share your time and somehow a "masked" solution like Wordle does.

I hope NYTimes buys this from you for lots of money! ;)

Whelp this just ate up a night's worth of sleep... scripted something to automate finding the play area, pipe orientation and click the solution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIpyQRBuwt0

Really bad code here: https://github.com/justecorruptio/hexapipes

Haha, way to go, this is awesome. Did it solve it all without human input? Can it do wraps?

Sorry about your sleep schedule).

Yup, it finds the play area and starts clicking. I haven' tried the wrapped version yet, but i think the nonwrap is funner. Also I wouldn't mind a 50x50 .....

40x40???? Wow, that would take me several hours if not a workday or more. Goodness lord

Thought I was clever, until I saw the grid size went to 40…

Very fun, although I don't really feel like it takes much skill. Seems to be a chill puzzle experience and doesn't scratch the same brain itch as something like a Rubik's cube or Loopover (https://loopover.xyz/).

I did the 20x20 in 32:31.596 and now feel like I can close this tab :P

This loopover thing is hard... I unscrambled two lines and was quickly running out of movement freedom. =)

You can try the wrap variant for an extra challenge.

Nice job! This reminds me a bit of a space puzzle game I made a while back ( the premise of which is to rotate the hexagon tiles to create a pathway from the player character to the orb in each level )

https://www.gorch.com/games/spacehex/

Fun puzzle! I played a few levels and I can see some similarities. Did you handcraft the levels? They don't look algorithmically generated.

I struggled with the first 5x5 taking about 8 minutes, then 2.5 minutes, then less than one minute. I'm still not even sure what principle I'm using to solve these but it is enjoyable. It's mainly just rotating until I hit the right color and looking for the next 3+ joint to rotate.

It's a bit like sudoku; start with the elements for which there's only one choice, and rotate into place.

Often this will lead to more tiles with only one viable configuration.

(At very least you'll reduce the search space.)

I used to play this exact game on a mobile app. One great feature was the ability to click and hold to "lock" certain pieces into place. Like you pointed out, there's certain pieces (on the edges) that only have one possible configuration

My 5x5 is record is 28s on my 5th game. The strategy is actually really simple once you get going: run through and identify all the "lockable" (only one possible configuration) tiles and then run through the consequences of those configuration and keep repeating

You can lock with a right click.

Do all solutions require you to have end nodes be connected to a single graph or there exists a puzzle where the solution has disjoint graphs? I'd also specify that no hanging pipes are allowed / utilize all pipes, although that part becomes obvious pretty quickly.

They all need to be connected into a single network. No hanging connections, no loops, no disjoint parts.

Kevin Stone's BrainBashers has a similar puzzle except with squares instead of hexes. https://www.brainbashers.com/network.asp

Solved in 1:39, very fun game and great implementation! I'm not much a fan of pipes games but have played similar concepts such as Infinite Energy on mobile. This is a good job for such a quickly developed project

Right click appears to do nothing... leaving an impossible to solve puzzle, as you've just locked a piece and no amount of left clicking will move it. Very frustrating.

Why would you lock a cell?

You can right click again to unlock it.

It's fairly handy when you're certain it is the only possible orientation and you want to prevent accidental rotations.

Wow! What fun. You have to make this a phone/tablet app...

Glad you liked it! I actually play it often on my phone, it's workable when zoomed in. An app would be nicer surely but I don't know how to build those =).

You 100% need to figure that out, because this is _really_ good and there’s money to be made here. Make sure you’re the one who makes it.

Well, this seems an appropriate place to plug the phone/tablet app we made with these puzzles, called Noodles 2.

It's the same puzzle style, with square, triangle and hex shapes, with some extra mechanics - disappearing pieces, infinite grid (it wraps around).

gereleth, great job on the puzzles - I played a few of the bigger hex puzzles and it was real smooth. :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lummoxlabs... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noodles-2/id1520711405

That's awesome. Really slick app.

Nice graphics, I love the soft lines.

I have wrapping infinite grid variants too, but disappearing pieces? Intriguing =)).

I just found Noodles 2 the other day when searching for a new puzzle game to play. I'm absolutely addicted to it; I've already completed hundreds of levels. Wish there was a way to "lock" a piece in place (like via long press) so I don't accidentally rotate pieces I've solved. Great game!

Hey I just mentioned your app in another comment! I don't suppose your app is open sourced haha?

Big fan of the original many years ago. Will definitely check out the sequel

Noodles and all the Conceptis games were the only puzzle apps I never deleted off my phone

This is a fantastic game.

I’m curious, did you use a special coordinate system for the hexagons or did you just make it work without any sort of coordinate system at all?

I didn't use any special coordinates, just some trigonometry. My code transforms coordinates between (x,y) - for drawing, (row, column) - for finding neighbours and (index into an array of tiles) - for managing state. It sort of grew organically and could probably be cleaned up a lot.

The hardest part was making the board repeat for the wrap variant making sure that all tiles have consistent wrap neighbours. I almost deployed a version that worked fine on odd-sized grids and went completely bananas on even-sized grids. The danger of always testing on a 5x5 board)).

Right/control click does not work on a Mac. On Safari and Firefox, they both bring up the contextual menu; on Chrome it just highlights the hex.

Oops, thanks for reporting. I'll try to find someone with a Mac to debug this.

Fun! After finishing and clicking on one of the bigger sizes, I couldn't go back to Hackernews because of how it handled redirecting (I think).

Feels like a much more fun version of minesweeper for me. Same sort of logic with less anxiety so you can start to go very fast.

Very nice! Maybe right-click should rotate the other direction.

Edit: Oh, now I see that right-click locks the tile. Yeah, that's a nice function, too.

You can change control mode in the settings. The default is rotate/lock, but there's a rotate/rotate as well. And... another tricky one for orienting a tile in one click.

Right-clicking locks a piece, but it also brings up a context menu that I need to get rid of. It would be nice if that didn't happen.

Are you on a Mac? I thought I got rid of this but I haven't tested on those.

No, Windows 10.

I see, thanks for reporting.

This contextmenu issue is sure showing me the ugly side of frontend development :/

Well done! It was intially intimidating, but it quickly became clear that the limited options made it almost a no-brainer to solve.

Love the game. Couple of nits on the site:

- changing puzzle size seems to break the back button - scroll behaviour is a bit strange

(Pixel 5, Chrome, if it helps)

Thanks for reporting, I'll look into this.

This would make a great hacking mini game. I got my average of 12 down under a minute so it's definitely engaging.

Fun game! Can I suggest adding a licence file to Github so people know what they can do with the repo.

Its annoying having to tap so many times, especially when certain pieces have few valid orientations.

You can check out "Orient / Lock" control mode in the settings. It lets you orient a tile in one tap but needs precision about where you tap. I mostly use this mode but it takes some getting used to, so I didn't make it the default.

I think my ideal controls for this would be key presses (configurable) while hovering.

Current bests are 5×5: 00:22.056, 7×7: 01:01.394.

Edit: also, a control to randomize the orientation of all unlocked tiles would be nice.

Nice.. it could be helpful if you could right click to turn the pieces in the other direction.

Some of the tiles become darker and then cannot be turned. What's that about?

Probably to lock a tile if you're sure it's in the correct orientation.

Fun game! This will make a great fidget when I don't have much to do at work.

Nice to see that shift-click rotates anti-clockwise - excellent semantics.

It looks great. It'd be cool to be able to zoom in-out on the 40x40.

Browser zoom kinda works. But yeah, adding better zoom/pan is in my backlog.

You sure are brave to take on a 40x40 =)

Any chance for a dark mode?

On the backlog it goes). Can't promise I'll get to it in a timely manner but thanks for the suggestion.

My first, a 5x5, in 3:08

It was fun, but on the edge of annoying, which seems appropriate.

my first 5x5 I couldn't solve in 4 minutes, then I gave up. This puzzle makes me angry.

2:37 for me, and I'm not terribly good at puzzles. I was getting frustrated and then it just kind of clicked. The color changing is incentivizing. I found it fun in general; might have to do a couple more...

I finished my first on 1:33, starting from the edge and working in, moving to a different spot when I noticed too much flex was my strategy.

Given the authors note in this thread about each puzzle only having one solution probably means I stumbled onto a decent strategy

Ya, the edge is key. So are hexes that have minimal possible positions.

I did my second 5 in 3:08 too. Which is weird.

This is pretty much how I solve regular puzzles too. I can do most 5x5s in under 20 seconds. Too often did my debugging sessions devolve into puzzle marathons =).

Wrap variants are another story as they have no outer edges. Discovering which tile groups give initial clues there is pretty fun too (when the regular puzzles aren't much of a challenge any more).

> Too often did my debugging sessions devolve into puzzle marathons =).

This is why I suck at game development. Congratulations for getting it out the door!

I started in the top left corner and worked connections down from there. So far I have a solve yet to take over a minute.

Fun game and nice site, it feels like to pipes what wordle is to words!

Compared to wordle, what an honour =). The site design actually comes from the default SvelteKit skeleton project. I was focused on the game part so I never changed it.

Awesome puzzle. Great job!

Cool game. Can you provide an example of what a solution looks like?

Here's an example of a 7x7 one that hopefully doesn't spoil too many people's games: https://i.imgur.com/EkA7he4.png

This 40x40 was a bad idea and I know I'm going to regret this.

Thanks! This is fun. I've worked my way up to 20x20 so far.

Very good. Well done. Now go forth and monetize before I do.

I like these! They're tough, but fair. Great job!

Is this available on Android? If no, anything similar?

This is great, got sucked almost immediately.

Only played a few levels, but I loved it!

This is quite fun actually.. nice work!

I solved a 40x40! 22:33:38.383

Congrats! This is some amazing dedication =).

Lol, it was probably more like 3 hours, there was a solid gap where I had to work and exercise and sleep and be social in between.

Very nice puzzle game

can you turn this into a captcha mechanism pls?

This is rad.

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