What is the Pipes puzzle?
Pipes is played on a square grid where each cell contains a piece of pipework. A tile can be an end piece with one stub, a straight pipe, a bend, a T-junction with three stubs, or a cross with four. The shapes never change — but they all start pointing the wrong way.
Your only action is to rotate a tile by 90 degrees. The puzzle is solved when every stub connects to a matching stub on a neighbouring tile, no stub points off the edge of the grid or into a dead end, and the entire network is joined together as one connected piece fed from the source.
- Every cell holds a tile with one to four pipe stubs.
- Rotate tiles a quarter turn at a time.
- Each stub must meet a stub on the next tile.
- No stub may point off the grid or to a dead end.
- All the pipes form a single connected network with no loops.
How to play Pipes here
Click a tile to rotate it clockwise; right-click to rotate it the other way. There is no penalty for turning a tile, so you can experiment freely — the move counter simply tracks how many rotations you use.
Watch the lighting. Each rotation re-flows the network from the source, so a tile that suddenly lights up confirms a good connection, and a branch that goes dark tells you a turn upstream broke the link.
- Left-click a tile to turn it clockwise.
- Right-click a tile to turn it anticlockwise.
- Lit tiles are connected to the source; dark tiles are not.
- Use Hint to snap one tile into its correct orientation.
- Use Solve to reveal the whole finished network.
Start at the edges
The border is the most constrained part of the grid, so it is the best place to begin. A pipe in a corner has only two directions it can face without pointing off the grid, and an end piece or a bend in a corner is often forced into a single orientation.
The same logic runs along every edge: a stub can never point outward, so edge tiles have fewer legal turns than the ones in the middle. Lock down the border first, then let those certain connections pull the inner tiles into place.
Why there are no loops
A solved Pipes grid is a tree: one connected network that branches out from the source and never closes back on itself. That means if you ever complete a loop, something is wrong, because a loop would leave a stub stranded somewhere else with nothing to connect to.
Use that to your advantage. When two branches are about to meet, only one of them can carry the connection; the other must turn away. Thinking in terms of a single growing tree, rather than independent tiles, is what turns Pipes from fiddly into satisfying.
Difficulty levels and why play online
Easy Pipes uses a 5x5 grid where the forced edge tiles almost solve themselves. Medium steps up to 7x7, Hard to 9x9, and Expert to a roomy 11x11 network with longer branches and more tiles to turn.
Playing online does the plumbing for you: every rotation instantly re-lights the network so you always see what is connected, your move count and timer keep score, and your progress saves locally in your browser. Each puzzle is built from a single connected tree, so it can always be fully linked up.
- Easy: a 5x5 grid to learn the rotations.
- Medium: a 7x7 network for everyday play.
- Hard: a 9x9 grid with longer branches.
- Expert: an 11x11 network for confident solvers.