About Plant Path
Plant Path: Number Puzzle is a quiet daily path puzzle made by AppWave LLC. It is the first title in the Zen Onsen series of casual puzzles: games meant to be a calm few minutes, not a score chase.
What it is trying to be
One rule, learned in three tiny boards and never changed: draw a single line from circle 1 through every number in order, filling the whole grid. The game has no timer pressing you during a level, no lives, no energy meter and no account. The board is a hand-brushed line on paper, and the reward for playing is a window sill that slowly fills with pots and flowers.
There is one shared daily board so that everyone has the same puzzle to talk about, and an unlimited ladder of levels because one puzzle a day is a small ration for a rule this good. A 24-hour league and a trickle of gift boxes give the long game somewhere to go without ever making it loud.
How the boards are made
Every board starts as a random path that visits every cell of the grid exactly once, grown by a technique called the backbite walk. Numbered circles are placed along it, and then a solver tries to find a second path through the same circles. If it finds one, more circles are added until the solution is unique; then circles are removed again, one at a time, as long as the board stays uniquely solvable. The board you see is the sparsest set of numbers that still admits exactly one line.
Rocks are carved out before the path is grown, so the line has to fill the grid around them. Walls are drawn afterwards on edges the solution does not use, which never breaks a board but does kill alternative solutions, and that is what lets the high levels carry fewer numbers. The daily is seeded from its date, so it is the same for everyone without any server involved, and the whole game, on the web and in the apps, runs on your own device.
Where it plays
Free in any modern browser at plantpathgame.com, with no download or sign-up, and as an app for iPhone, iPad and Android, where progress also follows you to a new phone through iCloud or Google Play Games. The game is supported by ads after the first ten levels; the apps offer a one-time purchase to remove them. See the apps and the FAQ.
Who makes it
AppWave LLC is a small independent studio. Plant Path is written and drawn in-house, from the puzzle engine to the lettering of the title. It is not affiliated with LinkedIn or any other publisher of path puzzles; where the site mentions Zip, it is to compare the games honestly for players coming from one to the other.
Questions, bug reports and kind words all go to support@plantpathgame.com.