Strategy⭐
7 Corner and Edge Tricks That Turn 1-Star Solves Into 3-Star Solves
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Enough reading — go solve something
Every idea on this page is one tap away from practice. The first world is free, no download, no sign-up.
▶ Play Flow PuzzleLoading…
Every idea on this page is one tap away from practice. The first world is free, no download, no sign-up.
▶ Play Flow PuzzleIf you only ever learn one thing about flow puzzles, learn this: the edges of the board are doing half the work for you, and most players ignore them completely. I spent my first month playing flow puzzles staring at the middle of the board like the answer lived there. It doesn't. The answer almost always starts at the wall.
Here are seven techniques, roughly in the order I'd teach them to a friend sitting next to me. None of them require you to be clever. They just require you to look where the puzzle is quietly telling you to look.
A cell in the corner of the grid touches exactly two other cells. That's a hard fact of geometry, not a strategy. So if a colored dot sits in a corner, its line has only two possible first steps, and often only one that doesn't immediately trap it. Solve corners first, every single time. They're the closest thing a flow puzzle has to a free move.
A dot on the edge of the board usually wants its path to hug the wall for a while. Why? Because the edge is a dead zone — cells there can only be filled by a line that runs along them. If your edge dots cut straight into the middle, you'll leave a row of orphaned border cells that nothing can reach. Run the wall first, then peel inward.
After you draw a line, glance at the border. See a single empty edge cell with filled neighbors on both sides? You just created an orphan, and the board is now unsolvable. Undo and reroute before you build on top of the mistake.
When a color has both endpoints sitting on the same edge, your instinct might be to bow the line out into open space. Resist it on tight boards. The straight wall-hugging route usually covers the edge cells you'd otherwise abandon, and it keeps the center free for the colors that actually need room.
Here's the move that turned my solving around. Before drawing a long path, ask: which empty cells can only be reached by this color? If a green dot is the only thing near a lonely pocket of squares, green is going to have to detour through them whether you like it or not. Plan the detour now instead of discovering it later.
Beginners love a clean diagonal-ish straight line between two dots. It looks elegant and it wins zero stars, because it leaves dead cells behind. Good solvers throw wide, looping "U"-shaped routes that swallow extra cells on the way. On full-coverage puzzles, the ugly fat path is usually the efficient one.
If an empty cell has three filled neighbors, exactly one color can still reach it — through the single open side. Spot these and you often get a free segment of the solution handed to you. Late-world boards on Sherlock and The Dragon are full of these little gifts if you're scanning for them.
Stuck players retreat to the easy colors because finishing one feels like progress. It isn't. The board is jammed because of the most constrained flow — the one with the fewest legal routes. Solve that one and the jam clears. Solve the easy ones and you just paint yourself deeper into the corner.
Notice the pattern across all seven: corners before edges, edges before center, constrained before free. That's the whole hierarchy. You're not solving left-to-right or by color — you're solving from most decided to least decided, letting the board's own geometry narrow your choices until the middle solves itself.
This is also the single biggest lever on your star rating, because efficient routing is exactly what the stars measure. If you're hunting perfect scores, pair this with the move-counting mindset from the route-planning guide, and watch your one-stars quietly become three-stars.
Go open a level and try just the first technique — corners first. One habit at a time. The wall is on your side now.