Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid

Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation.

I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So I did just that =).

I find hexagonal pipes a bit more difficult than the square variant because there's a larger variety of possible tile shapes. For an extra challenge I implemented wrap mode where the board can connect to itself (right to left and top to bottom), so there are no convenient outer walls to start from.

The site is made with Svelte Kit, its code is available on github at https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes>.

Hope you enjoy playing =).

Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid
hexapipes.vercel.app

Wow! What fun. You have to make this a phone/tablet app...

My first, a 5x5, in 3:08

It was fun, but on the edge of annoying, which seems appropriate.

my first 5x5 I couldn't solve in 4 minutes, then I gave up. This puzzle makes me angry.

Captivating! So, while generating the puzzle, you are essentially creating a random Spanning Tree for the given nodes (hexagon) arrangement? Then you randomize each pipe piece's direction within a hexagon?

What algorithm are you using for it Spanning Tree?

I have been working on Maze Generation[0] and found randomized Prim's, Kruskal's to be useful for Spanning Tree creation but the good old Depth First Search increases the difficulty of solving a Maze.

[0] https://github.com/emadehsan/maze/blob/main/media/hexagonal....