Trailhead
Draw one loop through the field. The paw prints in a clearing say how many of its four sides the loop runs along.
- Four levels: Easy to Extra Hard
- 11 techniques on its ladder
How Trailhead Works
Trailhead is a loop puzzle drawn as an animal trail across grassland. The field is a grid of clearings with a marker at every corner, and you lay stretches of trail from marker to marker. The finished trail is one closed loop: it never branches, never stops, and never crosses itself.
Three prints in a clearing mean the trail runs along three of its four sides. A stand of trees means none: no trail touches it. A blank clearing, with no prints and no trees, is no clue at all.
Easy, Medium and Hard boards start with a short run of the real trail already laid, which you can pick up from either end. Extra Hard starts blank. Every board can be solved by reasoning alone, and the generator proves that before a board ships.
A hint lights the clearing or marker it reads from in Blue and the stretch it settles in Orange, and names the rule it used, such as Count the Prints or No Early Loop. When the loop closes, the ground inside it fills with green.
The Rules
- 1
Follow the Tracks
Tap between two markers to lay a stretch of trail. The whole path is one loop: the animals end where they began. Most boards start with a short run already laid; pick the trail up from either end.
- 2
Count the Paw Prints
A clearing's prints tell you how many of its four sides the trail runs along. Three prints, three sides. A blank clearing, with no prints and no trees, is no clue at all: the trail may run along its sides or it may not.
- 3
Nothing Crosses the Forest
A stand of trees can't be crossed, so no trail touches it. Tap a stretch twice to rule it out yourself, and long-press a stretch to clear it.
- 4
Rule a Side Out in One Tap
Turn on X Mode below the field and a single tap marks a side as one the trail never runs along, without laying trail on it first.
- 5
A Mistake Left Standing Costs a Heart
Nothing counts while you are still moving stretches. Once the field sits still for two seconds, it is a mistake if a clearing has trail on more sides than its prints, three stretches meet at one marker, the trail runs into forest with no way on, or you ruled out a side the trail has no other way around. One pause costs one heart, however many mistakes it finds. A practice board has three hearts, and hearts never run out in the daily set.
The real screens.
Every picture on this page is the app itself, on a board from the game.
Where Trailhead Comes From
Underneath the trail, Trailhead is the loop puzzle best known as Slitherlink. It first appeared in the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli in June 1989, and has since been published under more than ten names, among them Fences, Loop the Loop and Takegaki.
In the classic, each clue is a digit from 0 to 3 and the loop is drawn along the grid lines. Trailhead draws the clues as one to three paw prints and draws a 0 as a stand of trees the trail never touches. The fiction is Dayzle's: you are retracing an animal trail, and because the animals end where they began, the trail is one closed loop.
How the Levels Differ
Easy is a 4×6 field with 15 of its 24 clearings showing prints or trees, and four stretches of trail laid for you. Medium is 5×6 with 15 of 30 clued and three stretches laid. The ground inside a Medium loop is two open areas joined by a narrow passage, and the smaller area carries fewer clues, so once you finish the first area you still have to work out the second. Hard is 6×8 with about 22 of 48 clued and two stretches laid. Extra Hard is 7×9 with about 29 of 63 clued and nothing laid.
Easy needs only the five basic rules, from Count the Prints to No Dead Ends. Medium adds No Early Loop, Hard adds the corner and neighbour patterns (Corner Clearing, Neighbours, Beside the Forest and Corner to Corner), and Extra Hard adds Inside or Outside. The trail also grows longer and winds more: it averages about 16 stretches on Easy and 57 on Extra Hard.
11 techniques, easiest first.
In Dayzle the hint and the solver are one engine, so these are the steps it takes to solve a Trailhead board, from the first you'll meet to the rarest. Each one has its own worked example and a clip of the hint on a real board.
Advanced
More visual games.
Visual
Parcel
Divide the board into rectangles that match their clues
Visual
Crowns
One crown per row, column, and colour — none touching
Visual
Crowns Hive
Star Battle on a hexagon: one crown per line, three ways
Visual
Equinox
Balance suns and moons in every row
Visual
Mosaic
Fit the pieces to cover the board exactly
Visual
Mosaic Hive
Pack polyhex pieces into a hexagonal board
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