Weave ZAP — Free Online Puzzle Game

You draw one continuous path through the grid that does two things at once: it visits every single cell, and it connects the numbered nodes in order — 1, then 2, then 3, and so on. One line, no cell left empty, no crossing itself. It sounds simple and it ties your brain in knots, in the best way, because the constraint of filling every cell while hitting the numbers in sequence leaves far fewer valid paths than you'd think.

Seven difficulty levels grow the grid from a gentle 5×5 up to a dense 11×11, with a fresh brain-bender every midnight. Send a friend the same grid with the challenge link.

Dead ends are self-inflicted: because the path must visit every cell, any corner you seal off is a loss you built ten moves earlier. The numbered nodes fix your route order and the grid does the rest. Seven levels from Beginner to Cyborg grow the board, the daily weave is one shared layout worldwide, and Mirror Maze hands the same path instinct a laser instead of a pen.

From the builder's desk

For me, Weave Zap is Euler's formula in action. I mean that quite literally — this game is the closest thing on Cliko to playable graph theory. Every board is a network of cells and connections, your path is a walk through that graph, and the visit-every-cell rule turns each puzzle into the question mathematicians have been asking since Euler walked the bridges of Königsberg: does a route exist that covers everything, and can you actually find it? Except here you don't get to admire the question from a comfortable distance. You're standing inside it, one move at a time, and the board keeps score.

The design problem I cared most about was the hint system, and the answer came straight out of that graph-theory framing. The rule that you must visit every cell has a brutal consequence: it turns corners and dead-ends into forced single-exit traps. A cell with only one unvisited neighbour isn't a choice — it's an obligation with a deadline attached. So the hint doesn't show you the solution, or even a next move in the ordinary sense. It highlights forced moves: cells that have exactly one unvisited neighbour remaining. That's the game teaching you to see what the board's structure already decided on its own, which is a far more useful gift than an answer would be.

And that brings us to the mistake, the one that surfaces ten moves after you make it — which is precisely what makes it so instructive and so maddening. Players leave a single-access cell for last. A corner, a dead-end, a little cul-de-sac off the main route — you'll get to it later, you think, and you weave onward. Ten moves on, you arrive. You enter the cell. And now you must leave through the same neighbour you came in by, which the rules won't allow, because that cell is already visited. The trap didn't spring when you walked into it. It sprang ten moves earlier, the moment you walked past it.

So the strategy inverts the instinct: visit single-access cells early, while the path still has the freedom to route through them and continue out the other side of their lone neighbour. Before your first move, read the board like a map — find the corners, the dead-ends, the cells with only one way in. Those are your appointments. The open middle of the board is flexible and will bend around your route as needed; the single-access cells will not bend for anyone, ever.

Plan the obligations first, improvise the freedom later. That's the whole game, and honestly it's not bad advice outside the game either. The daily weave resets at midnight, identical for everyone. Euler would have been unreasonably good at this one.

Start in the corners and along the edges, because those cells have the fewest ways the path can pass through them. A corner can only be entered and exited one way, so it's often forced — and forced cells are free progress. Lock down the edges first and the interior has much less room to wander.

The habit that saves you is watching for the cell you'd strand. The fastest way to fail Weave is to snake the path into a spot that traps an empty cell with no way to reach it later — a dead end you can't double back to. So as I draw, I keep glancing for cells that are about to get cut off, and route to pick them up before I seal them away. Think about which cells are hardest to reach and visit those while you still can; the easy middle ones will keep.

Weave ZAP trains you to satisfy several constraints at once and to look ahead far enough that you don't paint yourself into a corner. It's planning a complete route, not just the next step. Weave ZAP taught me something I didn't expect from a path puzzle: there's almost always more than one way to do a thing right. The grid looks like it has a single correct answer, but work it long enough and you find different routes that all reach every cell and hit every number. It's a good reminder for the rest of life — when one path closes, it rarely means there's no path. It usually means it's time to look for the other right answer.

That's foresight in a pure form — seeing the consequence of a move several steps before it bites — and it's exactly the kind of thinking that keeps you out of dead ends in bigger decisions too. The larger grids stretch how far ahead you have to see. No download, no sign-up — play in your browser on any device. If you like path puzzles, try Mirror Maze next.