Printable Slitherlink Puzzles

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

What the sheet actually looks like

Six boards to a batch by default, two across a page, at a scale that leaves a full centimetre between neighbouring dots — which is the measurement that matters, because on paper you are ruling short straight lines between them and a cramped lattice makes a mess within ten moves. The answers follow on their own pages rather than beside the boards, since a sheet carrying a puzzle and its solution within eye-shot 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 rather than turning into a grey approximation. On paper the board is reduced to pure line art: the panel behind it goes white, the dots and the loop go solid black, and the faint hairlines that help on screen are dropped entirely, because a printer renders them as smudges you will mistake for pencil.

The interface, the navigation and the controls are removed from the printed output 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 commonest thing wrong with printable puzzles online, and worth naming because it is so easy to ship.

Paper changes which size you want

More than it does for the other two puzzles here, and in a specific direction: this one is better on paper than on a screen, and the reason is the crosses. Ruling a short pencil line and putting a small × on a segment you have eliminated is faster by hand than any click, and eliminations are half of every slitherlink deduction. A great many people who find the puzzle fiddly on a phone find it entirely natural on a printed sheet.

For a classroom or a waiting room, 5×5 easy is almost always right — two or three minutes each, eight to a double-sided sheet, and it needs only the two rules on the first technique page, which can be explained in about a minute. For a long journey, 8×8 or 10×10 at medium is the sweet spot: long enough to take real time, small enough that you are not constantly losing your place.

Print hard and expert at 8×8 or larger. A 5×5 expert exists and is generated honestly, but twenty-five squares do not give a ring much room to close too early in, and the result tends to be one sharp moment surrounded by ordinary play rather than a sustained puzzle.

Nothing is relaxed for paper

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

That matters more here than anywhere else on this site, because paper has no undo and this is the puzzle where a mistake propagates furthest. One wrongly drawn segment on a slitherlink is not a wrong square you can correct later; it is a false premise that every subsequent deduction is built on, and forty moves later the board is unrecoverable with no way to tell whether you or the puzzle was at fault. It is also why the answer pages are printed by default rather than offered as an extra.

Common questions

More Slitherlink pages

• SlitherlinkUnlimited boards
• Daily slitherlinkA new loop every day
• Slitherlink rulesThree rules, in full
• Solving a loopA 6×6, worked
• Loop techniquesThe whole ladder
• Squares and dotsTechnique — easy
• The corner casesTechnique — medium
• Threes togetherTechnique — hard
• Closing too earlyTechnique — expert
• Guessing at loopsTechnique — refused, here too
• Slitherlink archiveEvery past loop