Amsterdammed

About Amsterdammed

Amsterdammed is a simple loop puzzle dressed as a map of Amsterdam's canals. The grid has open squares and blocked ones (houses, windmills, tulip fields and walls), and your job is to draw one continuous loop that passes through the centre of every open square exactly once, with no branches, crossings or dead ends. There are no number clues; the shape of the blocked squares is all you have.

It is one of the daily puzzles on Greatest Games, published at midnight US Eastern. Difficulty follows the week: Monday's grid is small, and the board grows each day to its largest on Sunday. Every puzzle has a single solution. You cannot lose and there is no move limit, so the clock is the result: a solve earns 100 points, with bonuses for never drawing a wrong segment, for the day's difficulty, for your streak and for speed, with speed cutoffs that scale with the grid.

It suits players who like Slitherlink and Masyu but want something they can finish in a few minutes. Past puzzles are in an archive, playable with a free account, and a short guided tutorial shows the rules.

How to play Amsterdammed

1. Open Amsterdammed and, the first time, play the short tutorial board.
2. Drag from one open square to a neighbouring one to lay canal; drag back over it to erase.
3. Tap a border, or right-click it, to mark an X where the canal cannot go.
4. Keep going until a single closed loop passes through every open square once, avoiding all buildings and fields.
5. Finish as fast as you can: time and a clean solve add bonus points.

Tips

• Start in corners and dead-end pockets: an open square with only two open neighbours must connect to both.
• Mark Xs on borders you have ruled out; they make the forced paths easier to see.
• Watch for pieces of canal that would close into a small loop before the whole grid is covered, and avoid them.
• Since a wrong segment costs the flawless bonus, think before you drag on the bigger weekend grids.

Questions