How to Play Twine Pics, a Daily Picture Connection Puzzle

Twine Pics is the Twine puzzle played with pictures instead of coloured dots. Each pair on the grid is a matching pair of images, and you draw a path from one to the other without crossing any path you have already drawn.

The win condition is the strict one that defines this family of puzzles here: connecting every pair is not enough, the paths together have to cover every square of the grid. Short direct routes lose; deliberately roundabout ones win.

Pictures rather than colours makes it the most accessible of the three variants, because matching does not depend on distinguishing similar hues.

How to play Twine Pics

1. The grid is seeded with pairs of matching pictures.
2. Drag from one picture to its match to draw a path. The path finishes itself when it arrives.
3. No path may cross another or reuse an occupied cell.
4. Drag backwards along a path to retrace and free up cells.
5. The puzzle is solved when every pair is joined and the "Filled n of N" counter reaches the full grid.
6. Daily is one shared puzzle per timezone per day; Quick generates unlimited fresh puzzles locally. Finishing records your time, moves and score.

Strategy and tips

• Identify all the pairs before drawing anything. Pictures take a moment longer to match than colours do, and a mis-drawn path costs more than the ten seconds of looking.
• Start from the corners and edges, where the route through a cell is most often forced.
• Assume the longest sensible path is correct. Filling the grid is the objective, and the shortest route between two pictures almost never does it.
• Check for orphaned cells after every connection rather than at the end. An unreachable empty square means the board is already lost.
• If two paths both want the same corridor, work out which pair has another way home. Usually only one does, and that resolves the conflict immediately.

What makes Twine Pics different

Using distinct pictures rather than colours means the puzzle is fully playable with any degree of colour vision deficiency, which the dot and cat variants are not. Same rules, same generator, no perceptual barrier.

It is generated by the same strict solver as the rest of the family: the board is cut from a Hamiltonian path so a full-coverage solution exists, then rejected unless that solution is unique. There is always exactly one right answer.

It also keeps its own daily and its own high scores, so it is a genuinely separate puzzle rather than a reskin of the one you did this morning.

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.