How to play Flowline
Flowline is a daily path-drawing puzzle. A square grid holds lettered pairs of endpoints — two A cells, two B cells, and so on — and you draw an unbroken path between each pair. Paths move only up, down, left and right, no two paths may touch the same cell, and the board is only solved when every pair is connected and every single cell is filled. That last rule is the whole game: connecting the pairs is easy, doing it so the paths jointly cover the grid is the puzzle. The daily is a 6×6 board; practice offers 5×5 to 7×7. There is no timer, no move limit and no fail state — the board waits until you see it.
How to play
- Each letter appears on exactly two cells — those are a pair. Draw a path between them: press one endpoint, then drag (or tap cell by cell) to the other.
- Paths move up, down, left and right — never diagonally — and no two paths may share a cell.
- You win when every pair is connected AND every cell of the grid is filled. Empty cells mean a path needs to take the longer way round.
- Drawing back along your own path erases it back to that cell; drawing into another pair’s cells is simply blocked, never destructive.
- Clear one pair with its Clear button, or the whole board with Clear board, any time.
- With a keyboard: arrows move around the grid, Enter starts or keeps a path at an endpoint, arrows then extend it, Escape abandons the draw.
- Undo (or Ctrl+Z, Cmd+Z on a Mac) takes back your last path, or a Clear.
Tips & strategy
- Corners and edges first: a cell in a corner has only two neighbours, so few paths can ever reach it — work out early which pair must claim it.
- The full-board rule means a short straight connection is usually WRONG. If two endpoints sit three cells apart, expect their true path to wander.
- Watch for cells your paths are sealing off: an empty pocket no remaining pair can enter means the current shape cannot win, however connected it looks.
- Retreat is cheap. Drawing back along a path erases just the tail — fix one bad turn instead of clearing the pair.
- Solve the constrained pairs (long distances, awkward corners) before the flexible ones, and leave the shortest connection for last — it will soak up whatever space remains.
Accessibility
Pair identity is always a letter as well as a color, so nothing depends on telling colors apart. The grid is one keyboard stop: arrow keys walk it cell by cell, each cell announces its position and contents ("Row 2, column 1. Pair A endpoint."), Enter starts and keeps a path, and a "board in words" section narrates every pair — where its endpoints are and how far its path reaches. One polite live region announces connections and the solve; nothing announces every step.