Play Bridges — Free

What is Bridges?

Bridges is a pure logic puzzle played on a grid dotted with numbered circles called islands. Your task is to connect those islands with straight bridges — horizontal or vertical lines — so that every island ends up touched by exactly as many bridge-ends as the number printed on it. There is no arithmetic and no luck involved: everything you need is written on the board, and every finished puzzle is a single tidy network in which you could hop from any island to any other by walking across bridges. It is quiet, tactile and deeply satisfying, the kind of puzzle you start "just to try one" and finish twenty minutes later.

The game is better known around the world as Hashiwokakero, a Japanese name that means "build bridges," and it is often shortened simply to Hashi. It was popularised by the same puzzle publisher that made Sudoku a household name, and it shares that family resemblance: a small set of rules, a guaranteed path to the answer through deduction alone, and a growing sense of mastery as the patterns become second nature. Some people call it Ai-Ki-Ai or "Chopsticks," but on vygam we use the plain, public-domain name Bridges. Every one of our puzzles is hand-authored to have a real, reachable solution, so you never have to guess — if a bridge feels forced, it almost certainly is.

How to Play

The rules are short, and a handful of moves are simply not allowed. A bridge or a placement is illegal when:

• it connects two islands that are not in the same row or column — bridges are only ever straight, never diagonal;
• the straight line between the two islands passes over another island — a bridge must run cleanly from one island to the next with nothing in between;
• you try to add a third bridge to a pair — at most two bridges may ever join the same two islands;
• the new bridge would cross a bridge that already exists — a horizontal and a vertical line can never intersect;
• the grid is left with any island whose count is wrong, or with islands split into separate groups rather than one connected network.

Bridges Tips & Strategy

Bridges rewards patient, provable deductions rather than trial and error. These four techniques will take you from staring at the grid to reading it fluently, and they work on every level from the gentle openers to the larger, denser boards.

1. Start with the highest-number islands

   The biggest numbers are the most constrained, so they give up their secrets first. An island marked 8 sits in the middle of the grid and has four possible directions; the only way to reach eight bridge-ends is two bridges in every direction, so all of them are forced immediately. The same logic scales down: a 6 in the centre must run at least one double, and a 4 on an edge with only two neighbours must double both. Cash in these certainties before anything else and the rest of the board opens up.

2. Look for forced bridges in corners and along edges

   Corners and edges have fewer neighbours, which makes them wonderfully rigid. A corner island can only reach in two directions, so a 3 in a corner must be a double one way and a single the other, and a 4 in a corner must double both. Along an edge an island has three directions at most, so high numbers there quickly become fixed. Whenever a number equals or nearly equals twice its number of available neighbours, some of its bridges are guaranteed — draw them in with confidence.

3. Run isolation checks before you close a loop

   The connectivity rule is easy to forget and it is where many almost-finished puzzles fall apart. Every island must end up in one single network, so watch out for a pair of islands that would happily satisfy their own numbers by joining only to each other — a 1 and a 1, or a 2 and a 2 — while the bridge that would tie them to the rest of the board still has to exist. Before you commit the last bridges, mentally trace a path from a far corner and make sure nothing gets stranded on its own little island group.

4. Mark islands as finished and prune their neighbours

   The moment an island has all the bridge-ends its number calls for, treat it as sealed — no further bridge can ever touch it. That single fact eliminates candidate bridges for the islands around it, which often forces their remaining connections. Working this way, "this island is done, so its neighbour can no longer come this direction," turns a wide-open grid into a chain of small certainties. Alternate between claiming forced bridges and sealing completed islands and even the largest boards unravel one logical step at a time.

Reading the Numbers on the Board

Every number in Bridges is a promise about how the finished picture must look, and learning to read those promises is the whole game. Because two islands can share at most two bridges, an island's number also tells you the fewest directions it must use: a 3 needs at least two neighbours, a 5 needs at least three, and a 7 or 8 needs bridges reaching nearly everywhere it can. Comparing a number against how many neighbours an island actually has is the single most powerful move you can make, and it is the reason the biggest numbers are the friendliest place to begin.

Small numbers are just as informative once you flip the thinking around. A 1 can never double, so if two 1-islands face each other with no other option they must not connect, because doing so would strand them from the rest of the grid — the bridge has to go the other way. A 2 might be one double or two singles, and the neighbours around it usually decide which. As you fill bridges in, keep re-reading the board: each new line changes what is still possible for the islands nearby, and a move that looked ambiguous a minute ago often becomes the only legal choice.

Bridges vs Sudoku, Nonogram and Other Logic Puzzles

If you enjoy Sudoku, Nonogram, Kakuro or Pipes, Bridges will feel like a welcome new member of the family. Like all of them it is solved by deduction with no guessing required, and like the best of them it uses numbers only as clues rather than asking you to calculate anything. What makes Bridges distinct is that you are building a shape — a connected web of lines — instead of filling a grid of cells. The "aha" moments come from geometry: spotting that a bridge is forced because every other route would cross something, or that an island must connect a particular way or else break the network apart.

That focus on connection makes Bridges especially good on a touchscreen, where dragging a line from one island to the next feels natural and immediate. It scales beautifully, too: a five-by-five board with a few islands is a two-minute warm-up, while a larger grid packed with high numbers can absorb a whole coffee break. Play a handful of levels and you will start to see the forced bridges at a glance, which is exactly the moment a clever little puzzle turns into a genuine test of foresight — and the reason Hashiwokakero has kept solvers coming back for decades.

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