Games
Introducing Amsterdammed: A Daily Loop Puzzle
Meet Amsterdammed, our daily loop puzzle. Draw one canal through every open square, around Amsterdam's houses and windmills. A fresh free puzzle daily.
There is a particular calm in drawing a single line that has only one right path. You start with a grid of open water and a few blocked squares, and by the end one continuous canal has wound its way through every open square and closed neatly back on itself. Amsterdammed is built entirely around that quiet, and it is set where the winding water belongs, in the canals of Amsterdam.
The genre is called Simple Loop, and Amsterdammed is our daily simple loop puzzle. If you like Slitherlink and single loop puzzles, this is the same family of pure deduction, just wearing the map of a city and without a single number clue.
How a simple loop puzzle works
You are given a grid. Some squares are open water and some are blocked by the city itself, the row houses, the windmills, and the tulip fields. Your job is to draw one continuous canal that flows through every open square exactly once and returns to where it started. That is the whole rule, and it is stricter than it sounds. The canal is a single closed loop, so every open square sits on exactly two segments, with no branches, no dead ends, and no place where the water crosses itself. It can never enter a blocked square, and it can never cross the wall barriers printed on the grid lines.
Because there is exactly one solution, you never guess. You find the squares that have only one legal route, lay that forced segment, and let it cascade into the next. A corner has just two ways to turn. A square hemmed in by houses and walls may have only one. Each certainty you place hands the next one to you.
Playing on phone or desktop
Drag between two open squares to lay a length of canal, and drag back over it to erase. When you can prove the water is not allowed along a border, tap that border to leave a small mark, so you can pencil in the dead ends as you narrow things down. A Check button tells you whether any segment you have drawn is wrong, without telling you which one, so a nudge never spoils the solve.
Difficulty is the size of the board
There are no separate difficulty settings to choose. The board simply grows across the week. Monday is a tiny five by five warm up, the midweek grids get roomier, and the weekend hands you a big open board for the finale. Beginners can start small on a Monday and veterans can wait for Sunday.
A gentle clock
Amsterdammed is timed, but softly. Nothing starts until you press Start, the clock pauses the moment you step away, and there is no move limit and no penalty for a messy path. Your solve time is simply the brag you share, and the share card never reveals the shape of the canal, so passing it along is safe.
One tip to start
Work the corners and the edges first. A corner of open water can only turn one way, and a square pinned against a wall or a house often has just one open border left, so those forced segments are free certainties. Lay them, follow where they lead, and the loop closes itself.
Amsterdammed is live now. Find the one path the water can take.
