Celtix

June 9, 2024 8:37 AM

Celtix – a daily puzzle game about making Celtic knots.

From the maker of Cell Tower.

posted by Wolfdog (13 comments total)

During the 2020 lockdowns, when everyone else was learning to make sourdough or cut their own hair, I was teaching myself to draw Celtic knots. I got pretty good at it! It’s knot (lol) hard at all and is very relaxing, like “adult” coloring books except you get to design everything yourself.

This is a cool puzzler, thanks for sharing!
posted by Doleful Creature at 9:19 AM on June 9 [3 favorites]

I love the idea of this (I have kicked around with creating my own celtic knot artwork) but I don't have the patience to figure out the fine points of how this game works right now. maybe later!
posted by supermedusa at 9:27 AM on June 9

Cute game! I wish it had an easy mode that started with smaller grids, though.
posted by leahwrenn at 10:28 AM on June 9 [9 favorites]

Challenging! Took about half an hour.

I completed #Celtix 1 using 47 walls.

http://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/celtix?p=1
posted by larrybob at 10:28 AM on June 9

What a cool game! It took me 48 walls to complete #1.

I became interested in interlock designs back in the 90s and found George Bain's book, Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction to be an excellent resource. I wish Celtix had been available back then too. It would have saved me a gallon of ink and whiteout.
posted by abraxasaxarba at 11:07 AM on June 9 [1 favorite]

Fun! Managed it with 26 walls after several dead end attempts. Starting by solving the green loop first seemed to make knocking out the other colours more tractable.
posted by tomsk at 11:12 AM on June 9

I like it!

19 walls. Note that you can continue to manipulate the knots after your first solve, if you want to try reducing your wall count.

I think this could be really excellent with some visual refinement. In general, I had trouble being confident which knots were which ... Two ideas I had were:

• highlight a particular knot on hover
• use patterns/halftoning/??? to help users with atypical color vision

posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 11:46 AM on June 9 [1 favorite]

And now I see there are some color options available through the menu. Let's see if any of them help me.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 11:48 AM on June 9

This was very, very hard, until something clicked. 33 walls.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 11:58 AM on June 9

I managed to get it down to 24 walls.

It would be interested (i.e. really, really annoying) if challenge scores were posted. Get below 20 walls for 3 points, 20-25 walls for 2 points, etc. There are too many possibilities to brute force this without some pruning, but with care it might be doable.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 12:07 PM on June 9

15 walls. I started by trying to separate dots of different colors rather than connecting dots of the same color.

I've been interested in knotwork since middle school, and I've learned a few different ways of constructing them since then. Unfortunately, I don't have references for any, and they've probably been lost to link rot by now.
posted by eruonna at 1:26 PM on June 9 [1 favorite]

The author points out on mathstodon that “remember, if you start today then nobody can ever get a better streak than you.”

The game is based on welshpixie’s guide to drawing Celtic knots, which is a relaxing way to doodle very complex knotwork.
posted by autopilot at 11:55 PM on June 9 [1 favorite]

Oh that is heaps of fun and I appreciate calming games that I can put down and come back to.
posted by clew at 10:05 AM on June 11