SlatePipeGrid Live

SlatePipeGrid is a pipe puzzle with nothing bolted onto it. Turn each tile until every pipe joins its neighbour and none of them is left pointing at a wall. That is the whole game. No lives, no timer counting down, no chest to open in four hours. ONE RULE, AND YOU CANNOT BREAK IT A tap turns a tile a quarter. A long press turns it back. Because a turn only ever changes that tile's facing, no board can be spoiled — a grid is exactly as solvable after a hundred taps as it was at the start. Whatever the mess looks like, it is a few quarter turns from being right. WATCH THE WATER SPREAD Pipes joined all the way back to the source light up as you work, so the run grows under your hand and a dead branch is obvious. Prefer to work it out in your head? Switch the highlight off and every tile stays the same colour until the last one clicks into place. SIXTY BOARDS ACROSS FOUR PACKS First Taps starts at four by four and teaches the turn. Back Kitchen adds more pipe than you can hold in your head at once. Under The Floor is long runs and a great many elbows. The Waterworks finishes at eleven by eleven, where there is nowhere to hide a mistake. Each pack climbs a row and a column at a time, so nothing jumps. STARS FOR THE SHORT WAY ROUND Three stars for finishing in the fewest turns the board allows, two for coming in under about a half again, one for finishing at all. The app knows the fewest because it knows the arrangement it built the board from — and if you find a shorter route to a different valid layout, you can come in under it. Only an improvement is ever written down, so a sloppy second run cannot cost you a star. A NEW GRID EVERY MORNING The daily board is worked out from the date itself. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is chosen for you: everyone playing on the same date is on the same seven by seven grid, and the app has no way of knowing that. Miss a day and you can still go back and play it. THE BOARDS ARE NOT FILES Every grid is built on the spot from a single number, and the same number always builds the same grid — on any phone, in any year. That is why the app is small, why it needs no network, and why wiping your progress does not cost you a single board. It costs you the stars, and nothing else. TEN CRESTS AND AN HONEST CHART First Grid through to The Waterworks cleared, with the run of days you have played, the boards done, and the turns made all drawn from your own record. Nobody else's score is here, because nobody else's score is anywhere. EVERYTHING STAYS HERE No analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no networking code. The Android build requests no permissions whatsoever — which also means no notifications, so it will never nag you about the daily grid. No account, no sync, nothing to buy, and no copy of your progress anywhere but this phone.