Pipes puzzles

Pipes puzzle also known as the Net or FreeNet is a game where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles of the board.

It is usually played on a grid of squares. That variant is available for example on puzzle-pipes.com or in Simon Tatham's puzzle collection.

This site however contains the same puzzle set on a hexagonal grid.

Hexagonal pipes

Hexagonal tiles provide more variety of tile shapes. But otherwise the logic stays the same.

Rotate the tiles to connect them all together with no loops. There are some features to help with the process:

• Connected tiles will get a random color to help you track what's already in the network.
• Forming loops is forbidden by the rules so the tiles that form a loop will be highlighted with a red background.
• When you're sure of a tile's position you can lock it by right-clicking. This will prevent it from accidentally being rotated out of its correct position.
• You can make edge marks by drawing a line across or along tile border. This lets you mark some edges as "definitely a wall" or "definitely a connection".

Try this small puzzle right here or solve many more like this in various sizes. Every puzzle here is guaranteed to have a unique solution.

Solved! Next puzzle

Hexagonal wrap pipes

Wrap pipes are a challenging variation of the puzzle. The connections in this variant are allowed to wrap between borders of the board. Imagine copies of the puzzle placed on all sides of it (left, right, top and bottom). This way tiles on the right border can connect to tiles on the left border - or "wrap" around.

Unlike regular pipes puzzles the wrap variant has no convenient outer walls to start the deductions from. Hence its increased difficulty. To help deal with wrap edges multiple copies of the puzzle are shown, tiling the screen. When you rotate a tile all its copies will rotate too.

Try this small wrap puzzle here. There are many more hexagonal wrap puzzles for when the regular variant isn't much of a challenge any more.

Changelog

• 2022-08-15
  • Added a setting to disable zoom/pan because the new functions weren't working well for some users. If you use the setting then puzzles will be shown fully zoomed out like before and you can rely on browser zoom to deal with small tiles.
  • As a small improvement made the page keep scroll position the same when you click "Next puzzle".
• 2022-08-13 The timer now stops ticking when you leave the puzzle page or switch to a different tab. It continues when you return to the puzzle. This should give more accurate times on large puzzles. Thanks to @joshwilsonvu for the pull request.
• 2022-08-11 Zoom and pan! Solving big puzzles should be easier now with the ability to zoom in and move around. A summary of improved controls:
  • Zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. Pinch to zoom on mobile or with a touchpad.
  • Click/touch and drag to pan. Panning starts after the distance traveled is > 1 tile width.
  • Right click or longpress to start locking tiles. Once started you can lock multiple tiles by moving the cursor around.
  • Make edge marks by drawing a line near the edge middle. A line along the edge makes a wall mark, across the edge - a connection mark. Draw again to erase. With a mouse or touchpad you can also click and hold near the edge middle to place an edge mark. In this case left mouse button makes a wall mark, right button makes a connection mark.
  • Click to rotate tiles (as before)
• 2022-07-31 Added some buttons based on HN feedback:
  • Start over - reverts the puzzle to initial state
  • Hide timer - hides solve times
  • New puzzle - lets you skip current puzzle and start another one
• 2022-07-30 Some bug fixes and improvements:
  • Added large wrap puzzles: 20x20, 30x30, 40x40.
  • Fixed browser back button not working after changing puzzle size or type.
  • Fixed multiple solutions found in some of the wrap puzzles. This was done by replacing a few of the tiles to remove ambiguity. If you had saved progress in one of the affected puzzles then the replaced area might look strange and might have to be redone.
• 2022-07-19 Improved wrap variant UI by displaying multiple copies of the puzzle tiling the screen. Fixed a bug with edgemarks not being restored from saved progress.
• 2022-07-11 Added wrap variant.
• 2022-07-10 Added solve time statistics and saving progress on a puzzle. Everything should be saved to browser local storage.
• 2022-07-05 Added loop highlighting. Tiles that form a loop now get a red background color.
• 2022-07-03 Added edge marks - now it's possible to mark an edge as a connection or a wall.
• 2022-07-02 Added a new control mode - click to orient. It takes less clicks than the default "click to rotate" but requires more precision with where you click.
• 2022-06-30 Added a thousand puzzle instances for sizes up to 40x40. Reworked navigation to show random puzzles.
• 2022-06-28 Made tiles look like actual hexagons instead of circles
• 2022-06-27 Added flow visualisation with random colors
• 2022-06-25 Initial release of hexagonal pipes puzzles