Games like Zip: daily one-line path puzzles

Several dailies play Zip's exact rule. Trail on Puzzle Round asks for one line from 1 to 10 that hits every number in order and fills every cell, ranked by time on a daily leaderboard. Zag, from Puzzleship, does the same with six grids a day from very easy to ultra hard. Puzzle Almanac adds a few walls to the grid and follows the week: a 5x5 board on Monday and Tuesday, 6x6 midweek and 7x7 from Friday to Sunday, free in the browser with no account. NumberMaze on PuzzleMadness starts at 1 and passes every number in order through every open cell, with Easy, Medium, Hard and a Mixed puzzle each day. Zip Puzzle by Penghua Chen is an iPhone app with a hand-made daily grid that is gentle on Monday and harder by Sunday.

Some puzzle sets carry a Zip-style grid among others, which suits players who also like Queens and Tango. LinkedLab, for iPhone and Android, has Synapse, which joins numbered checkpoints in order with one path through every cell, three boards a day. Logic Trio on iPhone gives three puzzles a day, and its Path is one line through every cell with the numbers in order. Trifold on iPhone includes Circuit, one path through every cell in number order, next to a star-battle and a suns-and-moons grid. Coronet in the browser has Cellrun, one path through every cell joining the numbered dots in order, in its set of daily puzzles. Braize on iPhone ranks a daily Path Puzzle that connects every node in order, one try a day, against friends on a weekly leaderboard. xpuzzle in the browser has path, one line through every cell in order, among its four daily puzzles. Daily Grid has Snake among its twelve free daily puzzles: start at 1, visit the numbered cells in sequence, fill every box once and plan around walls, with a leaderboard. Riddle of the Day's games page has Number route, one continuous route through the numbers in order that completes the board, next to Bridges and Areas. Hidato from the Daily Mail and Hidoku on PuzzleMadness are the same idea written in numbers: fill the missing numbers so they run in order, each touching the next, diagonals included. NumberPath on PuzzleMadness draws one line from a green cell to a red one over digits that must repeat 1, 2, 3, 4, moving diagonally too, and it does not need to fill the grid.

Chomp on Mind Loft turns the numbered checkpoints into mascots: you move one square at a time, eat them in the order shown, and every square you have visited becomes a wall, with exactly one route that gets the whole cast each day. The cast gets shorter through the week, so there are fewer signposts by Sunday.

Others drop the numbers and keep the line. Connect in the Times of India games section, subtitled The Perfect Trace, gives three grids a day where one line from start to end visits every square and goes around walls; it needs a login. Tiny Maze asks for the one route from door to door through every cell of a small walled maze. Trail and Winding Path keep it plainest of all: one numbered Daily board in Trail, one new grid a day on Puzzlebun, and in both a single line through every tile once. Bean Connect is a single timed path through every bean from a starting point. Loopy River on Inkwell Games and Amsterdammed on Greatest Games ask for the same full cover but close the line into a loop, so there is no start or end to find; Amsterdammed draws it as a canal around houses and windmills and grows from a small Monday board to a large Sunday one. Rolltop on Turnpan has you roll a die over every open square once, landing the right number face up on the numbered squares.

To start, Trail on Puzzle Round or Puzzle Almanac plays most like Zip itself; Zag and NumberMaze give more than one grid a day if one is not enough. For line puzzles beyond Zip's rule, such as Flow Free's coloured pairs, Slitherlink loops and Hashi bridges, the daily path puzzles page (/daily-path-puzzles) lists every daily game whose own puzzle is one of them.