About Paths

Paths is a free daily network puzzle from Mind Loft. One depot, a scatter of towns, a river and two ridges, and the job is to link every town back to the depot for as little as you can. Ridge lanes cost double and crossings cost triple, so the shortest route and the cheapest one are rarely the same thing. Later in the week the map gets harder: cliffs block lanes outright, and stretches of old track are free to run along if you spot them.

The trick is that towns are cheaper to link in bunches than one at a time. A lane you lay to reach one town is free for the next town that runs along it, which is why the obvious connect-the-nearest-town network is always several over, and why one shared trunk line through a single crossing usually beats three separate detours around the river.

Every board carries a proven cheapest network, so a perfect score is real and nobody beats it. A new board drops at midnight Eastern, and the week ramps: open ground Monday to Wednesday, cliffs from Thursday, old track and a ninth town on Friday and Saturday, and a 13×13 Sunday Edition with eleven towns and every element at once. No app, no signup, play free in your browser, keep a streak, and race the daily leaderboard. More dailies: Hedge, our daily loop, Parker, our gridlock puzzle, and Span, our border chain.