Tangler

About the game

Tangler is a quiet puzzle about drawing with tiles. Each tile carries a few coloured curves that run from one edge to another, and you get the next tile in a circle at the bottom of the screen. Your job is to put it on the board so that its curves continue the lines already there: a blue curve has to meet a blue curve, a green one a green one. When a line closes on itself into a loop, the loop disappears with a little flourish and the cells it covered are free again.

There is no clock and no hall of fame, only a counter of moves and a counter of points, so the game is meant to feel like making a pattern more than winning. Points come from the loops you close: the longer they are, the more they are worth, and closing several loops with one tile multiplies the reward. Because a tile may only go where every edge matches, planning ahead matters. A bad move can use up the last place where the next tile fits, and when no move is left the game ends with a small ghost-and-balloon animation.

Before you start you choose the shape of the tiles (square, hexagonal or with eight sides), how many colours there are (three to six), whether a tile may use the same colour twice, how big the board is (6, 8 or 10 cells on a side), whether hints are shown and whether the screen is light or dark. The board wraps around at its edges, and you can drag it to bring the part you want to the middle.

Playing it here

Click Play on the page, wait a couple of seconds for the game to load and press the big green button on the title screen. The game saves your settings and the board you were playing in this browser, so you can close the tab and come back to the same position. Nothing is sent to any server. The Quit button of the original app does nothing in the browser.

Controls

Tips

Think about the edges, not the middle. Every tile has to fit on all of its sides, so keep a few open edges of different colours; a board full of one-colour edges runs out of moves fast.

Close loops in groups. One tile that finishes two or three loops at once is worth far more than closing them one by one.

Start small. The 6 by 6 board with three colours is the gentlest way to learn how the tiles fit; the hexagonal tiles are noticeably harder.

FAQ

Is there a timer? No. The game is meant to be played slowly.

Is there sound? No, the game has no sound at all.

Can I play on a phone? Yes, the game was made for touch screens too.

Credits and licence

Tangler was made by Andrzej Novosiolov (andrzej-nov) and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. This browser edition is an adaptation: it adds a web build, replaces the font with Poppins Bold (SIL Open Font License 1.1) and simplifies the credits screen. The original README lists "free icons from flaticon.com", so those icons are credited here to Flaticon and their authors. The game uses libGDX, libKTX, ShapeDrawer and Universal Tween Engine; their licences are linked from this page.