How to solve a ColorPath puzzle.

The rules, stated precisely

A ColorPath board is a 4×4 grid. Every cell shows the colour it is supposed to end up. Below the board sits a tray of four paths, each made of four coloured beads in a fixed order.

To place a path you pick it up and trace a route across four cells. The route moves one step at a time to an orthogonally adjacent cell — up, down, left or right, never diagonally — it may bend as often as you like, and it may not revisit a cell. As you trace, the path's beads fill the cells in order: first bead in the first cell, fourth bead in the fourth.

You win when all sixteen cells match their targets. Note what the arithmetic implies: four paths of four beads is exactly sixteen beads for exactly sixteen cells. There is no spare capacity anywhere in the puzzle. Every bead must land on a cell that wants precisely that colour, and the four routes together must cover the board perfectly, with no overlaps and no gaps.

That single fact is where every technique below comes from.

Technique 1 — Start with the scarcest colour

Count how many cells on the board want each colour. Then find those same colours in the tray. Because the beads and the cells match one for one, a colour that appears twice on the board appears exactly twice across the four paths — and you now know which paths must reach those two cells.

A colour appearing once is even better: exactly one bead in the whole tray can serve it, and that bead sits at a known position in a known path. That pins one cell of one route, and a route with one cell pinned has very few ways left to lie.

Work from rarest to most common. The most frequent colour is nearly free information and should be the last thing you think about.

Technique 2 — Read the corners and the edges

A corner cell has only two neighbours; an edge cell has three; the four middle cells have four. Routes are much more constrained near the outside of the board, so that is where the forced moves are.

The rule to remember: if one of a corner's two neighbours is already occupied, the corner has to be the end of its path, because a route passing through a cell needs one neighbour to enter by and a different one to leave by. Corners therefore tend to be first or fourth beads, which means the colour a corner wants tells you which end of which path goes there.

Technique 3 — Lock the direction

A path's beads fill cells in trace order, so the same route traced from the opposite end lays the colours backwards. Every path effectively has two orientations, and choosing the wrong one is the most common reason a route that “should” work does not.

Use it deliberately. Once you know one cell a path must cover and which bead has to land there, the orientation is decided — a red bead in position two can only sit on a red cell that is the second step of the route, counting from whichever end puts it there. When a route looks one bead off, try it backwards before you abandon it.

Technique 4 — Keep the holes in fours

After you place a path, look at what is left empty. The remaining cells have to be divided into groups of exactly four, each group walkable in one continuous line.

So any empty region cut off from the others must contain a number of cells divisible by four. A stranded pocket of one, two, three, five or six cells is a dead end you can see immediately, before you have wasted a single further placement on it. This is the fastest check in the game and the one most worth building into your habits: place a path, glance at the gaps, count them.

Technique 5 — The T-shaped gap is always dead

Counting to four is not quite enough, because a four-cell gap also has to be walkable as a single line. Four connected cells can form five shapes, and four of them are fine:

The T fails for a reason worth understanding rather than memorising. To cover all four cells you must enter and leave the centre, which uses two of its three arms — and the third arm is left with no way in. No colour arrangement can rescue it. If a placement leaves a T-shaped hole, that placement is wrong, and you have learned it without trying a single bead.

Technique 6 — The checkerboard split

This is the advanced one, and it cracks boards that resist everything above.

Imagine the grid shaded like a checkerboard: eight dark cells, eight light. Every step of a route moves to a neighbour, which always flips the shade. So along any four-cell route the shades go dark, light, dark, light — meaning beads one and three always land on one shade, and beads two and four on the other.

That gives you a test that needs no route at all. Count the colours on the dark cells of the board. Now, for each path in the tray, you have two options: its first and third beads go dark, or its second and fourth do. Somewhere among those choices is a combination whose colours add up exactly to the dark-cell count — and usually only one. Finding it tells you the orientation of all four paths before you place anything, and once orientations are fixed the routes tend to fall out on their own.

It is more work than the other five techniques, so save it for the boards that deserve it. On a boss deck, where one locked set of paths has to serve several boards in a row, it is often the fastest way in.

How stars actually work

Worth knowing before you use any of this, because it is narrower than people assume.

A level's rating depends on one thing: assist charges. Stepping back a placed path costs one. Resetting a board that has at least one path on it costs one — once per reset, not once per path. Three stars means zero charges, two stars means one, and one star means two or more. Finishing a level never drops you below one star.

Two things deliberately cost nothing. Time is not scored at all — there is no clock on the play screen and none behind it, because a visible timer made a game meant to be unhurried feel hurried. And hints are free of the star rating. Every puzzle includes one, and using it costs you nothing but the hint itself. A scoring system that punishes asking for help teaches people not to ask, which is not a lesson worth teaching in a game with nothing at stake.

The practical consequence: think before you place, not after. The techniques above are all cheap because reasoning is free, while the two things that do cost you are the two ways of undoing a decision you had already committed to.

Common questions