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Vine Link
How To Play Vine Link
Join each pair of matching fruit with a vine. Vines cannot cross, trees are in the way, and the puzzle is only solved when every open square has a vine on it. Every puzzle has exactly one answer.
Drawing a vine
- Touch a fruit and drag to grow its vine, one square at a time. Vines go up, down, left and right, never diagonally.
- Reach the matching fruit to join the pair. The vine thickens and both fruit grow a little to show the pair is done.
- Lift your finger whenever you like. Touch the tip of a vine, or any square along it, to pick it up again from there.
- Drag back along a vine to shorten it.
- Touch a fruit to start its vine again from that fruit.
- Drag through another vine and it is cut at that square. If you back out before lifting your finger, the cut vine grows back.
- Trees and other fruit block the way. A vine has to go around them.
If every pair is joined but the puzzle isn't solved, the squares you missed light up. Some vine has to take a longer route through them.
The buttons
- Grid (top left): back to the list of levels.
- Curved arrow: undo your last move.
- Round arrow: clear the board and start the puzzle again.
- Light bulb: a hint. It draws one vine the right way and clears anything that was in its path.
- Arrow (bottom right): the next puzzle. It turns yellow when you have solved the one in front of you, but you can skip ahead at any time.
Stars
Stars reward thinking before you draw. You start every puzzle with three, shown at the top right.
- Three stars: you never threw away any vine you had drawn.
- Two stars: one or two slips.
- One star: three or more.
A slip is a cut left in place, a shortened or restarted vine, or an undo. A hint counts as two. Lifting your finger and carrying on from the tip of a vine costs nothing, and neither does a cut that you back out of.
The round arrow gives all three stars back, so you can work a puzzle out first and then draw it cleanly. The game keeps your best result for each level.
Levels and endless puzzles
There are five board sizes, from 5×5 to 9×9, with 24 numbered levels each. Every level is open from the start. Levels get harder as the numbers go up, and trees appear partway through each size. The bar under each size fills as you earn stars there.
The yellow ∞ button makes a new puzzle at the size you have selected, as many times as you like. The tick beside it counts how many you have solved.
Your stars are saved, and so is the puzzle you are in the middle of, so you can leave and carry on later.
Tips
- Start with the squares that have no choice. A corner square has only two neighbours, so a vine passing through it must use both.
- A fruit tucked beside a tree or in a corner often has only one way out. Draw that first step and see what it forces next.
- Fruit on the edge of the board usually travel along the edge. A vine that cuts through the middle tends to wall other pairs off from each other.
- A vine in this game never runs alongside itself. If yours doubles back next to its own squares, it has taken a wrong turn.
- Empty squares at the end mean a vine took a shortcut. Look for the vine running beside the gap and bend it through.
- Contact
Feel free to contact us with any bugs, complaints, or requests.
- Release Date
- October 11, 2026
History
Vine Link belongs to a family of puzzles that is well over a hundred years old: join matching pairs on a grid with paths that never cross.
A newspaper puzzle
An early form appeared in 1897 in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, in a column by the American puzzle maker Sam
Loyd. In 1917 the English puzzle writer Henry Ernest Dudeney included one in his book Amusements in
Mathematics as puzzle 252, A Puzzle for Motorists
. Each driver had to reach the spot marked with
the same letter, and no car was allowed to cross the track of another.
Number Link
The Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli turned the idea into a regular pencil puzzle and gave it the two names it is
best known by. In Number Link the pairs are numbers. In Arukone, short for alphabet
connection
, they are letters, as in Dudeney's version. As with Nikoli's other puzzles, a well-made one has
exactly one answer, and the solver reaches it by reasoning and not by trial and error.
The same problem as wiring a circuit
Engineers meet this puzzle at work. Laying out the tracks on a circuit board means connecting pairs of points with wires that must not touch, which is the same task. Computer scientists have shown that the general problem is among the hard ones: as boards and the number of pairs grow, no fast method is known that always finds the answer. Small boards stay friendly, which is why the puzzle works so well as a game.
From pencil to fingertip
Touchscreens suited the puzzle perfectly, because drawing a path with a finger is quicker and easier to correct than pencil and eraser. A wave of phone games in the early 2010s, Flow Free (2012) the best known among them, replaced the numbers with coloured dots and brought the puzzle to a far larger audience. Many of those games also made covering every square part of the goal, which turns a routing puzzle into a tighter, more logical one.
Vine Link
Vine Link moves the puzzle into the jungle. The pairs are fruit, the paths are vines, and trees stand in squares that nothing can pass through. Each fruit has its own shape as well as its own colour, so the pairs can be told apart without relying on colour alone, and the game uses no words on screen.
Every puzzle is made by the game itself. It covers a board with vines, keeps only the fruit at their ends, and then checks that the result has exactly one answer. Boards that have more than one are thrown away. The numbered levels were chosen from thousands made this way and put in order from easy to hard, and the endless mode makes a fresh one each time you ask.
Vine Link is an independent game. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nikoli, Big Duck Games or the makers of any other game mentioned here. All names belong to their respective owners.