Zip answers archive

October 2026 (19)

September 2026 (27)

Jumping to a specific Zip

The list groups days by month. Click a date and you land on that day inside its month page, with the path already drawn. If you know the puzzle number instead, open the month and scan the numbers printed next to each date; they advance by one per day. A new day is added at the reset, which for Zip is midnight Pacific time.

Because the path is drawn in full on the month page, the archive is also a quick way to check a path you finished but weren't sure of. Compare the order you passed through the numbered cells, and check that you filled the corners the same way: two different paths can't both be right, since each board has a single path that fills every cell.

Mondays and Wednesdays stayed at 6×6

Of the 37 boards from 3 September to 10 October 2026, 17 were 6×6, 13 were 7×7 and 7 were 8×8. Every Monday and every Wednesday board in that window was 6×6, ten out of ten. Sunday never was: its five boards split into two 7×7 and three 8×8. Friday was the most mixed day, with one 6×6, three 7×7 and two 8×8.

So if you want a short warm-up from the archive, a Monday or Wednesday is a safe pick, and if you want the largest boards, look at weekends.

The count of numbered cells followed a different rhythm. Wednesday boards averaged the fewest, 7.6, while the weekend averaged over 11. The single sparsest board was #555 on Wednesday 23 September: a 6×6 with only four numbers, so nearly the whole path had to be worked out from the board's shape. The busiest was #543 on 11 September, an 8×8 with twenty numbers.

Numbers, walls and turns by board size

Turns are counted along the solved path: every cell where the line changes direction counts once.

Every column rises with board size, but not in step. An 8×8 board has 64 cells, 31 per cent more than a 7×7, yet its paths averaged 39 per cent more turns and its walls 67 per cent more. Larger boards in this window were not just bigger; they were also more tightly fenced.

Eleven boards without a single wall

Walls are the thick lines between cells that the path can't cross. Eleven of the 37 boards in the window had none at all, and seven of those eleven were 6×6. On the other end, the 8×8 board on 15 September (#547) carried 28 walls, the most in the window.

A wall-free board is not automatically easy. Without walls, the only structure comes from the numbers and the board's own edges, so it rewards the habit of reading corners and pockets first. Each wall removes a choice, so a heavily walled board can be narrower than it looks.

In the table above, wall-free boards make up seven of the seventeen 6×6 boards but only one of the seven 8×8 boards.

Where does the path begin?

Number 1 sat on the outer edge of the board in only 10 of the 37 puzzles; in the other 27 it was somewhere inside. The highest number, where the path ends, was on the edge in 9 of 37 and in a corner cell in 4.

That matters because a path that starts in the middle has to leave room to come back. It has to leave room to come back for the cells around it, which is one reason our Zip guide suggests starting from the pockets rather than from 1.

The same reasoning runs in reverse at the end of the path. When the highest number sits in a corner, the last few cells are effectively fixed. When it sits in the interior, as it did on 28 of the 37 boards, the path has to arrive there from exactly one direction after filling everything else, and that is often the cleanest way to see the final stretch.

Distance between consecutive numbers

Measured along the solved path, the stretch between one number and the next averaged 5.0 steps across the 331 consecutive pairs in the window. Fifty-four pairs were direct neighbours, one step apart. The longest stretch was 47 steps on a single board, which means one long sweep of the grid with no number to steer by.

Long stretches are where most wrong paths start. When you study a board, find the longest gap between two numbers first and ask which cells must belong to it.

The 47-step stretch came on #536, an 8×8 on 4 September, and a 30-step stretch came on #540, a 7×7 on 8 September. Both are worth studying if long unguided sweeps are where you lose time.

Straight runs stay short

The longest straight stretch on any solved path in the window was 8 cells, and the average board's longest run was 6.5 cells. Paths that fill every cell snake back and forth far more than they cruise, so a long straight line drawn early is usually worth a second look.

Turns tell the same story from another angle. The fewest on any path was 10, on #562, a 6×6 from 30 September; the most was 40, on #552, an 8×8 from 20 September that also carried 24 walls.

The rule, word for word

Every stored path satisfies the full rule. We checked: all 37 paths visit every cell once, begin on 1 and end on the highest number.

Draw a single continuous path that starts at 1, passes through 2, 3, and so on in order, ends at the highest number, and visits every cell exactly once without crossing a wall.— HintSheet's LinkedIn Zip guide

Practice routines built on old boards

Each routine uses the drawn paths in the archive to study one habit, then carries it into the live board.

• Corners first: on a wall-free 6×6 entry, follow the drawn path through each corner cell. Unless a corner holds the first or last number, the path has to enter and leave it through its only two neighbours, so each corner fixes two path segments before you think about the numbers.
• Longest gap: on a 7×7 or 8×8 entry, find the two consecutive numbers with the most cells between them along the drawn path and see how the path sweeps that stretch. On the live board, plan that stretch before anything else.
• Interior start: pick an entry where 1 sits inside the grid and trace how the path comes back for the cells around it.
• Wall reading: on the 28-wall board from 15 September, trace the corridors the walls create and see how much of the path simply follows them.
• Turn count: after solving, count your turns and compare with the size averages in the table. It shows how much a full-coverage path has to bend, and why a long straight line drawn early deserves suspicion.

One numbering skip in early September

There is no entry dated 5 September 2026, and the puzzle numbers skip #538: the entry dated 6 September carries #537. If you are looking for either of those days, check the board against the one you remember before relying on it. Every day from 7 September onward has its own entry, one per date, in order.

Apart from that one spot, the archive has no other gaps: one entry per date and one number per entry, from 7 September to the newest board at the top of the list.

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