Pipe Flow

Tips for Pipe Flow

Pipe Flow gives you one chance with the water, so never open the valve until you have traced the whole run by eye. A single joint that does not meet will spray and end the attempt. Work from both ends at once, from the red valve wheel down and from the tank up, and meet in the middle. In the Pump House, the bolted castings never turn, so build the rest of the run around them.

Stars depend on using the exact number of turns a perfect solve needs, so think before you tap. In the Clock Tower, gear tiles turn their neighbours too, so check what a tap will do to the tiles around it. In the Waterworks, keep the two colours of water in separate pipes. If you lose track, restart rather than undoing one turn at a time. Zen does not count moves, which makes it a calm place to learn how the castings fit together.

How to play Pipe Flow

In Pipe Flow the board is an iron slab covered in pipe tiles: straights, elbows, tees, crosses and capped ends. The red valve wheel sits at the top and the brass tank at the bottom. Every tap or click turns a tile a quarter turn, and your job is to turn the tiles until one connected run of pipe leads from the valve to the tank with no open joints along the way.

Nothing happens until you open the valve. Then the water travels through the pipes one tile at a time and fills the sight glass on the tank if the run is sound. If any joint is left open, the water sprays out and the attempt fails, so you check the whole run before you open it. Every board knows the exact number of turns a perfect solve needs, and solving it in that number earns three stars. Undo takes back one turn, restart resets the board and a hint shows one tile that still faces the wrong way.

The boards are spread over six workshops that each bring something new: bolted castings that cannot turn in the Pump House, gear tiles that turn their neighbours in the Clock Tower and two colours of water in the Waterworks. On a keyboard the arrow keys move a cursor and Space turns the tile under it, U undoes, H gives a hint, P pauses, M mutes and R restarts. On a phone you simply tap the tiles.

About Pipe Flow

Pipe Flow belongs to a long-standing family of puzzles in which you rotate tiles until they form one connected network. The format works because every tile has only four positions, yet a single wrong one breaks the whole system, so the puzzle is in reading how the pieces depend on each other.

Kiloo's Pipe Flow, made by the Kiloo team, dresses the idea as a Victorian workshop in brass, copper and iron, and lets you watch the water run through your work at the end. Its 120 boards go from five by five to ten by ten and add a new rule in each workshop, which keeps the later boards from feeling like larger copies of the early ones. The exact par on every board gives careful players something to aim for, while Zen drops the counting altogether. It suits anyone who likes calm, logical puzzles, and the Daily Pipe and three-minute Rush give it a quick daily habit as well.

Frequently asked questions