Wires Tips: Clearing More Grids in 90 Seconds

Updated October 2026

Wires gives you ninety seconds and a stream of small grids full of coloured dots, and your score is how many grids you clear before the clock runs out. That makes it a speed puzzle rather than a careful one: a decent solution drawn quickly beats a beautiful solution drawn slowly. The good news is that the boards are friendlier than they look, and the controls have a few behaviours that are easy to exploit once you know them and costly when you do not. This guide covers both.

The rule that changes everything: you do not have to fill the grid

Many connect-the-dots puzzles insist that every square ends up covered. Wires does not. A level is cleared the moment every pair of dots is joined by an unbroken wire, and empty cells are completely fine. That one fact should shape how you play. You are not looking for the single perfect arrangement that tiles the board; you are looking for any set of routes that do not get in each other's way, and short direct routes are almost always the easiest to find.

The boards are also generated in a way that guarantees an answer. Each colour's route is laid down first as a random walk across empty squares, and the two ends of that walk become the dots. So every level has at least one solution, and usually many, because the original walks leave plenty of the grid unused.

To measure how forgiving that is, we generated thousands of boards and connected each pair by the shortest available route, closest pairs first. In our simulation that simple method cleared about 95 percent of the opening 5 by 5 boards and still around 84 percent of the largest 7 by 7 ones. When it failed, trying the same short routes in a different order fixed almost all of the rest, about 99 percent overall. Around one pair in eight sat in neighbouring squares, needing nothing more than a single short drag.

How the levels grow

Board size and the number of colours follow a fixed schedule:

• Levels 1 to 3: a 5 by 5 grid with 3, 4 and then 5 pairs.
• Levels 4 to 8: a 6 by 6 grid with 4, 5, 5, 6 and 6 pairs.
• Levels 9 to 11: a 7 by 7 grid with 6 pairs.
• Level 12 and beyond: a 7 by 7 grid with all 7 colours.

The early boards are your chance to bank levels fast. Three quick 5 by 5 clears in the first fifteen seconds or so leave plenty of time for the larger grids, where each solve naturally takes longer.

How the controls really work

Wires move one square at a time, up, down, left or right. The game only extends a wire into a square that touches its current end, so if your finger skips over a square or slides diagonally, the wire simply stops growing until your finger comes back next to its tip. Drag at a steady pace rather than flicking.

Several other behaviours are worth knowing exactly:

• Releasing anywhere but the matching dot discards the wire you were drawing. It is not saved halfway.
• Sliding back over your own wire shortens it to that square, so overshooting is easy to fix without lifting your finger.
• You cannot pass through a dot of another colour. The wire refuses to enter that square.
• You can pass over another colour's wire, but it erases that whole wire. It does not come back if you then back away, so the other pair has to be redrawn.
• Pressing a dot clears that colour's old wire and starts a fresh one from that dot.
• Pressing the middle of a finished wire cuts it there and lets you keep drawing from that square. If you then let go off target, the entire wire is gone, not just the part after the cut.

The erase rule is the one that costs most players time. A wire that you casually drag across to reach a dot quietly deletes a pair you had already finished, and you only notice when the level does not clear. If a board refuses to complete, look for a pair whose dots have lost their white outline; finished pairs show a thin white ring around both dots.

A fast solving order

Given the measurements above, a simple order works on most boards without any deep thought:

1. Neighbouring dots first. They take one tiny drag and can never block anything.
2. Then the closest remaining pairs, drawn along the edge or in a straight line whenever possible.
3. Leave the longest pair for last, routing it through whatever corridor is left open.
4. If the last pair is stuck, do not start over. Find the one wire standing in its way and redraw just that one around the other side.

Hugging the outer edge is a useful default for longer routes, because a wire along the border cuts the board less than one through the middle. Avoid looping a wire around a dot of another colour, since that seals the dot off completely.

Managing the ninety seconds

The clock starts when you press Start and is based on real time, so it keeps running if you switch apps or the screen turns off. The timer box changes style in the last 20 seconds. After each clear, the board is locked for about 0.8 seconds while the next one is prepared, and the clock keeps running during that pause, so a run of fifteen levels spends roughly twelve seconds in transitions. There is nothing to do about that except be ready to drag the instant the next grid appears.

Only finished levels count. If time runs out in the middle of a board, the partial work earns nothing, and a level completed during that last short pause before the next grid loads is not counted either. In the final few seconds, finishing the board you are on is worth more than tidying anything.

Practising for a higher score

Since the board does not need to be filled and almost every level falls to short routes, the gap between an average run and a great one is mostly hand speed and the number of mistakes you make. Track two things across runs: how often you accidentally erase a finished wire, and how often you release a drag just short of its dot. Cutting both to zero is usually worth several levels. Your best result is saved on your device, and any score above zero can be entered in the Hall of Fame from the time's-up card.