Telegraph is a prairie at night, cut into square tiles, and every tile carries a length of telegraph wire. Somebody has spun every one of them. Turn them back, a quarter at a time, until a single line runs from the telegraph office to every station — no luck in it, and every board has exactly one way to wire it.
The rules
Each tile holds a piece of wire: a straight, a corner, a T, or an end — and every end is a station, a small round terminal node. The big node in the centre is the telegraph office, the hub the line runs out from; it is fixed and never turns. The board is solved when the wire is one line:
- Every station is on it — joined to the office through the wire.
- Nothing is loose — every wire end meets another wire end, and none runs off the edge of the board or into a blank side.
- No loops — a loop is a short. The wire on it flickers red, so you learn the rule by seeing it.
Wire that is joined to the office lights up gold as you go, with a pulse running out along it, and each station's node lights with a glow the moment it is on the line. When the last one lights, the line is up — the whole of it flares and the stations chirp a Morse dit.
Everything has to be used. The puzzle is not a path from the office to one station but a single tree that reaches every tile, so a wire end you leave pointing at nothing is as wrong as a loop.
Turning and pinning
- Tap a tile to turn it a quarter, clockwise.
- The Turn button switches taps to anticlockwise (and back) — a tile that is three clockwise turns from home is one turn the other way.
- Hold a tile to pin it once you are sure of it; a pinned tile shows a small pin and won't turn until you hold it again. Unpin all clears every pin. Pins are only for your own certainty — they are not hints.
On a keyboard: the arrows move a cursor, Space turns the tile under it, Shift+Space turns it the other way, L pins it, D switches the turn direction and H asks for a hint.
Turns, par and waste
Every tile is some number of quarter-turns from home. Taking each tile the short way round — either direction — the fewest turns that solve the board is its par, shown beside your turn count as you play (Turns 12 · par 34). Every turn past par is wasted, and the result card tells you how many. A straight is never more than one turn from home; any other tile is at most two, if you turn it the short way — so a solve with no waste needs the Turn button now and then.
Solving with no wasted turns is the feat the best badges and the best skins ask for. A wasted turn costs you nothing else: the time still counts on the leaderboards.
Hints
Free play gives you three hints a board. A hint only points — it never turns or unpins anything for you. Most of the time it rings the next tile to turn, the one a careful player would settle next. If you have pinned a tile that is wrong, it rings that one instead, with a dashed warning ring, so you can unpin it. Any hint means the board is no longer a clean solve: a hinted board posts no time to the leaderboards and earns none of the no-waste badges. The Daily has no hints at all, so everyone's time there is a fair comparison.
The levels
Every board is solved first by a program that works the way a person does, cheapest step first, and none of them needs a guess. What changes from level to level is the size of the prairie and how much of the reasoning has to look at the whole line rather than one tile and its neighbours.
Easy — read the edges
Every tile can be settled from what is right beside it: a wire can't point off the edge, and it must point at a neighbour whose end points back. Start at the border and the corners, and the board falls in from the outside.
Medium — watch the whole line
Somewhere on the board, local reasoning runs out, and you need the line itself: a turn that would close a loop is wrong, and so is a turn that would seal a piece of wire off with no way left to reach the office. A Medium needs that once or twice.
Hard — again and again
A 9×9 with long runs of straights and few stations to anchor them, where that line-wide look is needed at least three times. Pinning what you are sure of earns its keep here.
The Daily
Every day there are three new boards — an Easy, a Medium and a Hard — the same three for everybody in the world, turning over at midnight UTC. Each is a race against a countdown: four minutes for the Easy, eight for the Medium, fifteen for the Hard. The clock runs only while you play; step away and it stops, and the board is covered so it can't be studied off the clock. In the last minute the clock turns coral.
Solve it in time and your finish time goes on that Daily's leaderboard (when you're signed in). If the clock reaches zero first, time's up: that board is a miss for the day — no leaderboard time, and your streak starts again tomorrow — and you can reveal the finished line. Solving any of the day's three keeps your daily streak going. Free play has no clock to beat: it deals a fresh board at the level you choose, as often as you like, with three hints each.
Skins
The board can wear six looks. One is yours from the start; the other five are earned by playing — never bought — and each is shown in the settings with the feat it takes and how far along you are. Signed in, they follow your account to any device.
- Prairie Night The house look: copper wire turning gold on dark planks. Free.
- Copper & Verdigris Solve 10 boards — any level, free play or the Daily.
- Blueprint Solve a Medium or Hard board with no wasted turns and no hint.
- Storm Line Solve a Hard board.
- Lamplight Solve a Daily seven days running.
- Gold Wire Perfect Line: solve a Hard board with no wasted turns and no hint.
Achievements
Signed in, Telegraph keeps eight badges for the game and five for its Daily:
- First Signal — connect every station. Ten Lines — solve ten boards. Lineman — solve a hundred.
- Steady Key — a Medium or Hard with no wasted turns and no hint. Long Line — a Hard. Perfect Line — a Hard with no wasted turns and no hint.
- Quick Key — an Easy in under 45 seconds, no hint. Morse Speed — a Hard in under two and a half minutes, no hint.
- The Daily: First Wire, Spotless Daily (no wasted turns), Week on the Wire, Month on the Wire and Line Regular (25 Dailies solved).
Tips
Start at the edges
A tile on the border has fewer ways it can face, and a corner tile fewer still. Settle the rim first and work inward.
Stations are easy to place
A station's single wire has to point at a neighbour whose wire points back. Two stations side by side can never face each other — that would make a two-tile line cut off from the office.
Count before you turn
Decide where a tile should point, then take the short way round: one tap, or one anticlockwise tap instead of three clockwise. That is the whole difference between on par and wasted turns.
Pin what you're sure of
On a Hard board, a few pins stop a stray tap undoing work you have already done.
Where it comes from
Telegraph is a rotation puzzle of the kind usually called Net, long a favourite of puzzle collections: a network of pipes or wires scrambled tile by tile, to be turned back into one connected tree. This one is strung across a prairie at night.
Good to know
- Boards are built on your device from a seed, so there's nothing to download and the Daily works offline once the page has loaded.
- Your games in progress, your settings, your skins and your streaks are kept on your device. Signing in adds the Telegraph leaderboards and badges, and carries your skins to other devices; it's never required.
- Every board has one solution and can be solved without guessing. If you're stuck, there's a deduction waiting to be found.