How to Play Twine, a Daily Connect the Dots Flow Puzzle

Twine is a Numberlink puzzle: a grid seeded with pairs of coloured dots, and your job is to draw a path between each pair without any two paths crossing. The twist, and it is the whole game, is that connecting every pair is not enough. You have to fill every single square of the grid.

That one extra rule changes the puzzle completely. Connecting pairs by the shortest route is easy and almost always wrong, because it strands empty squares that no remaining path can reach. Twine is really about routing paths the long way round on purpose.

How to play Twine

1. Each puzzle is a grid seeded with pairs of dots, every pair in its own colour.
2. Drag from one dot to its matching dot to draw a path. A path completes automatically the moment it reaches its partner.
3. Paths cannot cross and cannot enter a cell another path already occupies.
4. Drag back along a path to retrace and shorten it. Nothing is ever permanent until you win.
5. You win when every pair is connected AND every square of the grid is filled. A live "Filled n of N" counter tracks how close you are.
6. Play Daily for the shared puzzle of the day, or Quick for an unlimited supply generated in your own browser. Winning shows your time, moves and score, and records the run to your top-ten list.

Strategy and tips

• Start at the edges and corners. A corner square has only two neighbours, so the path through it is usually forced, and forced moves are free information.
• Never take the direct route. If two dots are three cells apart, the correct path is almost never three cells long - it is the one that mops up the empty region alongside it.
• Watch for squares that would be orphaned. Any empty cell whose free neighbours have all been consumed is a dead end, and the moment you create one you have already lost the board.
• Count parity on regions. If drawing a path cuts the remaining empty space into two pieces, both pieces still need to be covered by paths that can reach them - often that is immediately impossible.
• Work outside-in. The border and the region behind it are the most constrained parts of the grid, and once they are settled the middle usually resolves itself.
• Every daily puzzle is generated with a verified unique full-coverage solution, so if your layout connects everything but leaves a gap, it is definitely wrong rather than an alternative answer.

What makes Twine different

The usual flow-style puzzle asks only that you connect the pairs, and the better ones ask you to fill the board as a bonus objective. Here filling the board is the win condition, which makes the puzzle strictly harder and considerably more interesting.

The generator is stricter than it needs to be for that reason. It cuts a Hamiltonian path over the whole grid into pair segments so a full-coverage solution always exists, and then rejects the candidate unless that solution is the only way to fill the grid. Boards that merely happened to have a full cover also admitted lots of pair-connecting layouts that stranded a few squares, and those boards felt impossible rather than hard.

Quick mode generates entirely in your browser with no network call at all, so it works on a plane. Daily fetches one shared puzzle so your result means the same thing as everybody else's.

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.
• Games like Wordle: daily puzzles worth a bookmark: One puzzle a day, the same for everybody, done in five minutes. Here is what actually kept working after the clones died.