How to Play Kitty Twine, a Daily Cat Connection Puzzle

Kitty Twine is the same Numberlink puzzle as Twine, played with cats. Each pair on the grid is a cat drawn as a recolourable silhouette in a real coat colour - ginger, white, black, grey, tabby - and you connect each cat to its twin with a path that does not cross any other.

And, as in Twine, connecting the pairs is only half the win condition. Every square of the grid has to end up covered. That is what makes it a puzzle rather than a tracing exercise.

It has its own daily puzzle and its own high score list, entirely separate from the other Twine variants, so playing one does not spoil the others.

How to play Kitty Twine

1. Every cat on the grid has exactly one match in the same coat colour.
2. Drag from a cat to its twin to draw a connecting path. It completes automatically on arrival.
3. Paths cannot cross each other or reuse a cell that another path already occupies.
4. Drag back along a path to retrace it if you need the space for something else.
5. You win when all pairs are connected and every square is filled - watch the "Filled n of N" counter.
6. Daily gives everybody in your timezone the same grid for the day; Quick generates a fresh one locally, as many as you want.

Strategy and tips

• Match by coat colour rather than by silhouette. The cats are drawn from a handful of poses, so two identical-looking cats in different colours are not a pair.
• Solve corners first. Corner cells have two neighbours, so whatever passes through them is usually forced.
• Take the long way round. A short path between two nearby cats is almost always the wrong answer, because filling the grid is the actual objective.
• After each connection, scan for cells that have become unreachable. Finding an orphan early costs one retrace; finding it at the end costs the board.
• If the colours are hard to tell apart on your screen, tap a cat - the connection you start makes its pairing unambiguous.

What makes Kitty Twine different

The cats are not decoration pasted over a generic grid. Each pair is recoloured into a genuine coat colour, and the palette is enforced so no two pairs in one puzzle can share a colour - which matters, because in this puzzle colour is the pairing information.

Underneath, it is the same strict generator as Twine: a Hamiltonian path cut into segments so a full-coverage answer always exists, and every candidate rejected unless that answer is unique. The cats change how it feels, not how fair it is.

It is the version to hand to someone who bounces off abstract puzzles. A grid of coloured dots reads as homework; a grid of cats does not, and the puzzle underneath is exactly as hard.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Free daily puzzle games to play in your browser: A shortlist by puzzle type - word, logic, colour, memory - of dailies that take five minutes and are the same for everyone.