How to play Connect
A trail draws itself across a grid of dots. When it fades, redraw it from memory. Ten trails a day on an 8×8 grid, from seven dots to sixteen, on the second shelf, outside the daily line-up.
Play today's Connect · Watch the gameplay demo
The rules
- Watch the trail. It starts at the marked dot and moves one step at a time — up, down, left or right, never diagonally, never along a line it has already drawn.
- From the seventh trail on, the trail crosses itself: it passes straight through a dot it has already used, once or twice a trail. A dot can be crossed; a line is never redrawn, and a crossing is always straight through.
- When it fades, start at the marked dot and drag from dot to dot — or tap them one by one. Only a neighbor counts, and never the same line twice.
- Drag back along your own line, or press Undo, to take a step back. Slips are free until the last dot lands.
- The trail is graded the moment your drawing is as long as the real one. Every dot up to your first wrong turn counts; after the wrong turn, nothing does.
- A perfect trail drawn without pausing is smooth. It is a badge, not points.
- One game a day. Your progress is saved trail by trail, so a refresh is not a second attempt; the archive holds every past day.
Strategy
- Remember turns, not dots. “Right, down, down, right, up” is a rhythm; a picture of eight dots is not. Say it to yourself as the trail draws.
- Chunk the long ones. A sixteen-dot trail is four or five little trails end to end. Name the corners, and name the crossing: “through the middle dot again” is one thing to remember, not two.
- Know the route before you move. Hesitating mid-trail is where wrong turns come from — and where the smooth badge is lost.
Scoring
Your score is the share of the 115 dots you remembered — every dot up to the first wrong turn of each trail. Ten perfect trails is 100; a slip on the last dot of the sixteen-dot trail still pays for the fifteen before it. Connect sits outside the daily line-up, so its score never moves your day’s total.
Full details on how scoring works.