Printable Bridges Puzzles

Choose a size, a level and how many, and print. The boards go on one set of pages and the finished networks on another, so a sheet cannot spoil itself.

What comes out of the printer

Six boards to a batch by default, two across a page, at a scale that leaves room to rule a line between two islands with something blunter than a technical pen. The answers follow on their own pages rather than sitting beside the boards, because a sheet carrying a puzzle and its solution within eye-shot is not a printable puzzle, it is a spoiler with extra steps.

Nothing on the page is an image. Each board is drawn as vector artwork by the same renderer that draws the one you play on, so it comes out at whatever resolution the printer runs at and stays crisp instead of turning into a grey approximation. On paper the board is deliberately reduced to line art: the panel behind it goes white and every stroke goes black, because a background that reads as pale grey on screen prints as a solid block that bridges disappear into.

The interface, the navigation and the controls are removed from the printed output entirely rather than hidden. A hidden element still occupies space and still paginates, which is how a one-page sheet becomes one page of boards followed by three blank ones — the single most common thing wrong with printable puzzles online, and worth naming because it is so easy to ship.

Picking a size and a level for paper

For a classroom or a waiting room, 7×7 easy is almost always right. It fits eight to a double-sided sheet, takes two or three minutes each, and needs only the two island-counting moves, which can be explained in about a minute — or handed over as the technique page, if you would rather not do the explaining.

For a long journey, 11×11 or 13×13 at medium is the sweet spot. Large enough to take real time, small enough that the board does not become an exercise in keeping your place, and crossing-level difficulty keeps it moving without demanding a written tally beside every island.

Print hard and expert at 11×11 or larger. A 7×7 expert exists and is generated honestly, but eight islands do not give the connectivity argument much to work with, and the result tends to be one sharp moment surrounded by ordinary play rather than a sustained puzzle. Bridges rewards space in a way the binary puzzle does not.

Paper gets the same proof as the screen

Printed boards come from the same generator as the ones on screen and are held to the same standard: exactly one network satisfies the numbers, and it is reachable by argument at the level printed on it. There is no second, sloppier path for paper.

That matters more on paper than anywhere else, because paper has no undo. A printed board with two answers wastes an afternoon and gives you no way to discover that the board was at fault rather than you. It is also why the answer pages are printed by default rather than offered as an extra.

Common questions

More Bridges pages

• Hashi puzzleUnlimited boards
• Daily bridgesA new board every day
• Bridges rulesFive rules, in full
• Solving a boardA 9×9, worked
• Bridge techniquesThe whole ladder
• Island countingTechnique — easy
• CrossingsTechnique — medium
• Spare capacityTechnique — hard
• IsolationTechnique — expert
• Guessing at bridgesTechnique — refused, here too
• Bridges archiveEvery past board