Hexapipes

About the game

Hexapipes is the old "pipes" or "network" puzzle, the one where a scrambled board of pipe pieces has to be turned back into a working network, played on grids that are far from the usual squares. The default is a field of hexagons, but the same puzzle comes on square, octagonal (octagons with small squares between them), elongated triangular, trihexagonal, snub square, rhombitrihexagonal and triangular grids, and on a grid of cubes, and most of them have a "wrap" variant where the edges of the board are connected to the opposite sides.

The rules are short. All the pipes must form one single network. No pipe may leave the grid (on the wrap grids, it comes back on the other side). Tiles shaped like a bulb are dead ends. Closed loops are not allowed. And each puzzle has exactly one solution, so a puzzle can always be solved by logic, without guessing.

The site has puzzles of every size from 5x5 to 40x40, generated in your browser at the moment you ask for them; a Daily page with a hard puzzle chosen for the day; and a Custom page where you can choose the grid, the size and how many branches the network has, ask the solver to solve a puzzle in front of you or watch it do it step by step, or load a puzzle from a file.

Daria Vasyukova (gereleth) made Hexapipes in 2022 and has kept adding grids since. This is a copy of her site that runs from a single page, with the daily puzzles that were shipped with it.

Playing it here

Click Play. From the home page, choose a grid and then a size, or press Daily or Play in the top bar. Click a tile to turn it; right click or press and hold on a tile to start locking, and move the pointer across more tiles to lock them too, so that you do not turn them by mistake. You can also mark the edges of a tile as a wall or a connection. The mouse wheel zooms and dragging moves the board, which matters on the large sizes. The page is taller than the frame, so scroll it with the pointer over the header or the margins, because over the board the wheel zooms. The solve times of the puzzles you finish are kept in this browser, and so are the settings.

The "Daily" page uses one puzzle for each day of the year. The author's files cover up to the end of November 2026; for the days after that, the page uses the puzzle of the same day and month from an earlier year, so there is always one to play.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Start from the edges. A tile on the border of the board cannot point outside it, so it has fewer ways to turn, and a bulb in a corner has fewer still. Settle those first, lock them, and work inwards.

Lock what you know. On big boards it is easy to turn a tile that was already right. Locking is cheap and it saves the time you would spend finding the mistake.

Use the edge marks. When you know that two tiles cannot be connected, mark the edge as a wall. Marks do the same for you as pencil notes in a sudoku.

Credits and licence

Hexapipes was written by Daria Vasyukova and is released under the MIT licence. It is built with Svelte and SvelteKit (MIT) and small libraries (normalize-wheel, BSD-3-Clause; randomcolor, CC0; transformation-matrix, MIT), whose licences are linked from this page. The changes made for this site are: building it as a static page that runs from a folder and uses #-links, the daily puzzle choice for days that have no file, the removal of the social-card tags and of the links to other sites and social networks, and a rule that blocks any request to other sites; the patch, the build script and the licence texts are linked from this page.