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Plumb
Arcade · Oldies · plays in your browser, no download
The water starts flowing whether you are ready or not, and you lay the pipe in front of it. You do not choose the piece — you are handed the next one and you must put it somewhere. That single restriction is the whole game.
Where it comes from
Pipe Mania came out at the end of the nineteen-eighties from the British studio The Assembly Line, and was sold in the United States as Pipe Dream. It was ported to practically everything with a screen, and it has had a long afterlife as the thing a game makes you play when a character is supposed to be hacking something.
The design has one idea and refuses to dilute it. You do not choose your piece. A queue hands you a straight, an elbow, a cross, in an order you did not pick, and you have to place it now, somewhere, while the water advances. Every other puzzle game of its era let you pick or at least rotate; this one gives you a shape and a deadline.
That turns it into a quite different kind of problem. You are not solving a puzzle — you are building one faster than it is being consumed, and the correct play is often to lay pipe that goes nowhere useful simply because it buys you four more seconds of track.
How to play
| Placing | Click or tap a square to drop the next piece from the queue there. |
|---|---|
| Overwriting | You may place over a piece the water has not reached yet — at a cost. |
| The flow | Starts after a short delay and never stops. |
| The target | A minimum length of pipe the water must travel before the level is passed. |
Our version
The queue always visible several pieces ahead, so a bad placement is your decision rather than a surprise.
Three things that help
Build long before you build clever. The target is a distance, not a destination. Loops and switchbacks are not wasted moves, they are the point.
Keep the end of the pipe away from the walls. A pipe pointing into a corner needs exactly the right piece next, and you do not control what is next.
Spend the crosses. A crossing piece lets the water pass through the same square twice. Holding it for a perfect moment usually means drowning with it in the queue.