Hexa-Loop Path

Five nodes, ten lines, one path: trace every green edge exactly once before the clock — or the bot — beats you.

Updated July 16, 2026

Closing the Loop

Hexa-Loop Path puts five numbered nodes on a circle and wires every one of them to every other one. That's a complete graph on five points — ten lines total, no gaps, no isolated nodes. Five of those ten lines are marked as your targets: thick, lime-green, dashed. The other five are thin gray filler you're supposed to leave alone.

The round is solved the instant you've traced all five green lines, and only those five, as one unbroken path — before the 75-second clock hits zero or, in a duel, before the bot finishes its own version of the puzzle first. Solve it and the board bursts into particles with a victory chime; miss the deadline or touch the wrong line at the wrong moment and the round is lost.

"Loop" is a bit of a stretch as a description, though. The five target lines are generated as a random walk: the game picks a starting node, then takes five steps across unused connected lines. Nothing in that process requires the walk to end back where it began. Most rounds hand you an open trail that touches all five nodes rather than a true closed loop — though every so often the randomness produces one that does close, and you can start tracing it from anywhere.

No Hexagons, No Rotating — Just Clicking

Despite the name, there isn't a hexagon anywhere on the board, and nothing to rotate. The five nodes sit in a pentagon layout, evenly spaced around a circle, and your only input is the mouse. If you came in expecting Shape Rotation-style tile spinning, recalibrate: this is a pure click-to-trace puzzle.

Click any node with an empty path and it becomes your start, glowing lime. From there, click a second node. Because every node connects to every other node, that click always represents a real line — there's no such thing as clicking two nodes that aren't wired together. If the line between them hasn't been used yet, it's added to your trail immediately, turns solid lime, and your active node moves to whichever one you just clicked.

Keep clicking outward from wherever your trail currently ends. There's no dragging, no typing, and no way to jump to a node that isn't adjacent to your current position (trivial here, since everything is adjacent to everything). A RESET PATH button sits under the board for the moment your route stops working — one click wipes the trail and hands you back a blank graph to start over.

Tracing a Valid Circuit

Two rules run in the background on every click. First: you can't reuse a line that's already part of your current trail. Click it again and nothing happens beyond a buzz — your path stays exactly as it was, and you're free to try a different node instead.

Second, and less forgiving: if the line you just clicked is one of the five gray non-target lines, the board flashes, shakes briefly, and your entire trail is wiped back to nothing. There's no partial credit and no undo-just-that-click — one wrong line and you're back to picking a fresh start node.

What actually counts as a solved circuit is a matching set, not a matching order. The game checks, after every click, whether the lines you've traced so far are all green targets, and separately whether all five targets have been covered yet. You can zigzag across the graph in any sequence you like; what matters is that when you stop, the collection of lines you've drawn is exactly the five green ones — no fewer, no more, and all connected as one continuous walk, since each click has to extend from wherever your last click landed.

There's no partial score for getting four of five. A round is either won outright — 1 point to your opponent's 0 — or it isn't, whether that's from running the clock out, taking one wrong turn too many, or the bot beating you to it in a duel.

How Boards Get Harder

The board itself doesn't scale. Every round is five nodes, the same complete graph, the same five green targets out of ten total lines. There's no version of Hexa-Loop Path with a bigger web or more nodes — the difficulty comes from elsewhere.

In duel mode, that "elsewhere" is your opponent's clock. The bot solves its own copy of the puzzle on a timer built directly from its ELO rating: a base time of 60 seconds minus (its rating − 1200) × 0.04, floored at 12 seconds, then nudged up or down by a random factor between 0.8× and 1.2× so it doesn't feel robotic. Run the numbers and a bot near 1200 ELO takes roughly 48 to 72 seconds to "finish," while anything rated 2400 or higher hits the floor and wraps up in as little as 9.6 to 14.4 seconds — see how ELO ratings work for what those numbers mean for matchmaking.

The round clock, though, never moves — it's 75 seconds flat regardless of who you're facing. Against a slow bot, that gives you room to think. Against a fast one, you're often racing a solve that finishes before you've traced a third of your path. And the clock is absolute either way: if it hits zero, the round counts as a loss for you, full stop, whether or not the bot has actually finished tracing yet.

The other source of difficulty is just the shape of the random walk each round hands you. Some target sets read as an obvious chain around the outside of the graph; others route several green lines through a single hub node, which is harder to parse at a glance even though the underlying rules never change. Practice mode gets that same variation with no clock pressure from a bot at all.

The Solver's Mindset

Before you click anything, count how many green lines touch each numbered node — that's the node's degree within the target set. A node with an odd number of green connections has to be an endpoint of your trail: you either start there or finish there, never just pass through. If exactly two nodes come up odd, those are your two candidates — start at one and the solve forces you to end at the other. If every node's count is even, the target set is a genuine closed loop, and you can start anywhere on it.

The second habit worth building: don't cut yourself off. If taking a particular green line right now would strand other unused green lines on the far side of the graph — leaving you no way back to them without reusing a line — that move is a trap. Save it for when it's the only line left, not the first one you reach for.

This is the same kind of forward-planning graph puzzle that shows up in Eulerian path problems generally: work out the shape of the whole route in your head before committing to a first click. It leans on sequential reasoning and short-term visual memory — holding a planned five-step route in mind while your eyes separate real green targets from gray noise. That's a genuinely different mental task from raw arithmetic speed; see what the research actually says about which kinds of practice transfer and which don't.

Resetting is free. If you're two clicks in and realize your plan doesn't reach every target, hit RESET PATH immediately rather than clicking forward and hoping. A clean restart from a better-planned node beats grinding out a route you're not sure closes.

A Sample Solve

Picture a typical round: the five nodes sit at the points of a pentagon, numbered 1 through 5 clockwise from the top. Ten lines connect them — five short "outer" lines between neighboring points (1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, 5-1) and five longer "diagonal" lines that skip a neighbor (1-3, 2-4, 3-5, 4-1, 5-2). Suppose the game highlights all five diagonals as targets — the classic five-pointed star pattern — leaving the five outer lines gray.

Every node touches exactly two of those diagonals, so every node has even degree: this is one of the rounds that genuinely closes into a loop, and you can start anywhere. Say you start at node 3.

• Click node 3 — it lights up lime as your start.
• Click node 5 — the diagonal 3-5 is a green target, traces solid, path is now 3→5.
• Click node 2 — diagonal 5-2 traces, path is 3→5→2.
• Click node 4 — diagonal 2-4 traces, path is 3→5→2→4.
• Click node 1 — diagonal 4-1 traces, path is 3→5→2→4→1.
• Click node 3 — diagonal 1-3 traces, closing the star back at your start. All five greens are covered, and none of the five gray outer lines were ever touched.

That's a win: particles burst off every node in your path, the victory sound plays, and the round scores 1-0 in your favor. If instead your second click from node 3 had gone to node 2 or node 4 — the short outer lines 3-2 or 3-4 — you'd have hit gray immediately, and the board would have shaken your whole path back to nothing before you'd gotten anywhere.

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