Trade Route

Six towns — Anvil, Bridge, Chalk, Delta, Ember and Ferry — each with its own price for the same commodity: what a crate costs to buy there, and what it fetches to sell there. You open at Anvil holding ₹100.00, and you have exactly four hops. Every hop buys one crate where you are standing and sells it where you arrive, so the purse moves by the sale price there minus the purchase price here. You have won when the fourth hop closes on the target figure exactly — not near it, not above it, on it.

That one word changes everything about the puzzle. Trading games normally ask you to make as much as possible, which one reflex answers forever: always ship to the town paying the most. An exact figure defeats that reflex outright, and the generator throws away any board the greedy route happens to land on. So the answer almost always needs a hop that loses money, deliberately, to bring the total back down to the number.

Every board is built backwards. The prices are drawn first, then a four-hop journey is drawn and walked, and whatever purse that journey closes on becomes the target. An exact plan therefore exists before you ever see the board, and no board can be impossible. The game then enumerates all 625 journeys — five destinations, four hops — counts how many close on that figure, and uses the count as the board's rating and your score multiplier. A board with one way through pays eight times the base; one with eight ways pays once.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is outlined.
2. Aim at a town with the arrow keys or W A S D. Left and right step one town along the row, up and down jump between the two rows, and the cursor steps over the town you are standing in, so it is always pointing at somewhere you can actually go.
3. Step through the towns in order with F or Shift if you would rather not aim.
4. Ship a crate there with Enter or Space — or just click or tap the town. That is one hop, and there are only four. There is no undo.
5. Read each town button before you commit. It shows the town's buy and sell prices, then what shipping there from where you stand right now would do: ▲ with a gain, ▼ with a loss, and the purse it would leave you holding. The town you are in is marked ◆ here and cannot be chosen.
6. Watch the two lines under the board. The ledger shows every stop and the purse at each one. The other line says how far off the target you are and how many of the remaining journeys still close on it exactly.
7. Stop when the ways-open count reaches zero. The round ends there and then, because no sequence of the hops you have left can reach the figure any more.

How do you plan a trade route that finishes on an exact amount?

Work from the last hop backwards, not from the first hop forwards. The final purse is the sale price of the town you finish in, plus whatever you were holding after paying for the crate at the town before it — so the town you end in fixes the last term of the sum completely. Start by asking which finishing towns could possibly leave you on the target, then work out what you would have to be holding when you set off on that last hop, and treat that as a new, smaller target three hops out. Two hops in a row through the same pair of towns is a shuttle worth sell[B] − buy[A] then sell[A] − buy[B], which is nearly always a loss equal to the two spreads plus nothing — useful precisely because it is a small, predictable way to shed money when you are over the figure. And when you are under it, the gain on a hop is the destination's sale price minus the current town's purchase price, so the big money is in leaving a cheap town for a dear one, never in the dear town itself. The single most common mistake is chasing the biggest gain on hop one and discovering on hop four that everything left is either far too much or far too little; the ways-open count is there to tell you that on hop one instead.

Why did a profitable hop cost me the round?

Because profit is not the goal — the figure is. A hop can put ₹12.00 in the purse and still be the wrong hop, if the towns you can reach afterwards cannot take you back down to the target in the hops you have left. That is the whole lesson the game exists to teach, and it is why the ways-open count sits on screen: it recounts, after every hop, how many of the remaining journeys still close on the figure exactly. When it drops from four to zero on a hop that made money, the readout has just shown you something a profit-and-loss column never would.

What happens if I cannot afford a crate?

You travel empty and the purse does not change. It is a legal hop and it still costs you one of your four, so it is never a way out of trouble, but it does mean the purse can never go negative and the round can never lock up with no move available. In practice you only meet it after a run of heavy losses, and it is worth knowing about because it means a hop out of an expensive town on a thin purse may do nothing at all.

Is there any money, betting or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. The rupee figures are arithmetic on a puzzle board — there is no currency, no account, nothing to buy, no lives to refill and nothing to win or lose but the round. Your score is worked out from the finished board and it never leaves your device.

Why does the round end early sometimes?

Because the puzzle is already decided. Once no journey from where you stand can reach the target, carrying on would just be spending hops to confirm it, so the game says so immediately and shows you the board. It is the same rule that guarantees the game always ends: four hops, no undo, and a dead position counts as a loss the moment it happens rather than dribbling out over three more turns.

Can a board have more than one answer?

Yes, and any of them wins — this is not a puzzle that has to be unique. The number of answers is used as the difficulty dial instead. A board with more than eight ways through is discarded during generation for being too loose, and the rest are rated by how few ways they have: one way only, narrow, or open. That rating is your score multiplier, so a board that took real work is worth more than one you could have stumbled into.

Does it work offline, and can I play with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Yes to all three. After the page has loaded once, the towns, the prices, the generator and the counter all live on your device and nothing is sent anywhere while you play. Arrows aim, F steps through the towns and Enter ships, so nothing needs a mouse. Every town announces itself in words — "Bridge, buy ₹36.00, sell ₹35.00, shipping here +₹4.50" — and the live region reads the purse, the target, how far off you are, how many hops are left and how many journeys still reach the figure. Nothing depends on telling colours apart: a gain carries ▲, a loss ▼, an empty ride ·, and the town you are standing in ◆ with the word here.

Six towns, one commodity, four hops and no undo. Prices run from ₹14.00 to ₹48.00 in fifty-paise steps and every figure is held as whole paise, so nothing ever rounds. There is no timer and no hint button — the ways-open count is the hint, and the backwards-from-the-last-hop method in the first answer above is the technique. Boards are drawn fresh each round rather than climbing a designed ladder, so difficulty varies from board to board within the one-to-eight band the generator allows.

Toll Roads is the other puzzle here where an exact total is only half the rules and the shape of what you have built is the other half. Weight Split and Sum Links are the ones where hitting an exact figure does all the work, with no map to walk. Route Plan is the opposite temperament: there the cheapest way through really is the answer, which is precisely the shortcut this game takes away from you.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.