Rulebooks/Two Dots

Rulebook 09 · Connection puzzle

How to play Two Dots

A grid of coloured dots. Drag a line through neighbouring dots of the same colour and they disappear, with new dots falling from the top to replace them. Each level asks for a small quantity of something — clear so many blue, sink so many anchors — inside a fixed number of moves. There is no clock. The move counter is the whole of the pressure.

Written by Petra Lindqvist ·

Game type
Colour-connection grid puzzle, single player
One level
One to four minutes, entirely at your own pace
Input
Drag a continuous line between adjacent same-coloured dots
Attention
Untimed; the board waits indefinitely between moves
Progress
Level goals met within a move limit

What is on the screen

A rectangular grid of dots in five or six colours, a goal panel at the top, and a moves-remaining counter. The goal panel is specific — a number of each colour to clear, or a number of anchors to drop off the bottom edge — and it changes completely from level to level.

Dots connect horizontally and vertically only. Diagonals do not count, which is the first thing almost everyone gets wrong, and the line you draw has to be continuous: you cannot lift your finger halfway and resume.

close a square……and every dot of that colour goesthe ghosted dots are the ones this one move clears
The square rule. Closing a loop takes every dot of that colour off the board, not just the four you drew round.

Playing a level from scratch

Read the goal before touching anything. A level that wants twelve blue dots and a level that wants two anchors sunk are different games played on the same grid, and the good move for one is a wasted move for the other.

Then look for squares. If your line ever closes a loop — four dots forming a square — the game clears every dot of that colour on the board, not just the ones you touched. This is by a wide margin the most powerful thing in the game, and it is the difference between finishing a hard level and running out of moves on it.

Anchors, when a level has them, only fall when the dots beneath them are cleared. So an anchor level is really a level about clearing low, not about clearing much.

Controls

One continuous drag. Press on a dot, move to an adjacent dot of the same colour, keep going, lift to confirm. Dragging back over the previous dot un-does that step, which is worth knowing — you can back out of a line before committing to it.

Lifting your finger is the move. Until you do, nothing has been spent.

What a session feels like

Quiet and slow. There is no timer anywhere in the game and no reaction element at all, so it sits comfortably in the gaps of a day — a level while the kettle boils, another on the walk to a bus stop.

Levels are self-contained and short. The difficulty curve is gentle for a long time and then becomes genuinely demanding, which is when the square rule stops being a nice trick and starts being mandatory.

Pointers for a first hour

  • Learn the square immediately. Closing a loop clears every dot of that colour on the board. Nothing else in the game comes close.
  • Goal first, pretty move second. A long line in the wrong colour is a spent move that did nothing.
  • Clear low for anchors. Anchors fall through empty space, so the dots underneath them are the only ones that matter.
  • Back out of a bad line. Dragging back over your last dot removes it. The move is only spent when you lift.
  • Diagonals never connect. They look like they should for the first ten minutes. They do not.

Quick Play Notes is a reference site. This page describes Two Dots from our own play; the move counter it mentions is a display number inside the game. We have no commercial relationship with its publisher, and the title is named only to say which game this page explains.