Barravox

What is Barravox

Barravox is a pipe puzzle with a gauge attached. Every sector is a small grid holding a pump, one or two tanks, and a scatter of pipe segments lying at the wrong angles. Click a segment and it turns a quarter turn; keep turning until the line runs unbroken from the pump to the tank and the fluid starts to move. That much is the old rotate-the-pipes puzzle, and the first sector teaches it in about thirty seconds.

What makes it a different game is the number on the pump. The fluid leaves with a fixed pressure and loses two of it for every cell it crosses, so the route you build is also a budget you spend. A tank that needs at least forty will not accept a scenic tour of the whole board. Then come the tanks with a ceiling as well as a floor — send them too much and they overload — and suddenly the shortest route is the wrong answer and you are looking for ways to lose pressure on purpose: a longer path, or a valve, which passes fluid but bleeds twelve.

How to play

1. Click or tap a pipe to turn it a quarter turn clockwise. Right-click, or hold your finger on it, to turn it the other way — which is faster whenever you have overshot by one. Pumps, tanks and walls are bolted down and will not turn.
2. Some sectors hand you spare pieces in the tray at the bottom. Pick one, then click an empty cell to install it. Right-click a piece you installed to take it back. The tray is always short of what a careless route would need, so plan before you spend.
3. A valve is welded into the line and never turns: click it to open or close it. Closed, it blocks the flow entirely. Open, it passes the fluid but bleeds twelve pressure — which is exactly how you calm a tank that keeps overloading.
4. A cracked pipe leaks twelve pressure and shows it, zigzagging in amber. Arm a weld kit from the header, then click the crack to seal it. Kits are counted and there are never many, so a crack you can route around is a kit you keep.
5. When two colours share a board, each pump only feeds the tank of its own colour, and the two lines have to cross without mixing. The cross piece is what lets them: it carries one flow straight up and down and another straight left and right, and never lets them meet.

Strategies that work

• Read the tank before you touch a pipe. A tank asking for at least forty is a distance problem; a tank asking for thirty to forty-five is a budget problem, and those two want opposite routes.
• Count cells, not pipes. Pressure drops two per cell the fluid enters, so a route eleven cells long costs twenty-two from the pump's number — you can work out whether a plan lands in the band before you turn anything.
• When a tank overloads, do not look for a leak. Look for a shortcut: the network always uses the highest-pressure route it can find, so if a shorter path exists anywhere, that is the one being used. Break it and the long route takes over.
• Valves are the throttle, not an obstacle. Two open valves cost twenty-four pressure, which is often the difference between an overload and three stars.
• In the crossing sectors, decide where the two lines cross before you build either of them. Everything else follows from that one cell.

A little history

Rotating a tile until a network joins up is one of the oldest puzzle ideas that survived the move to screens, and it has been rebuilt hundreds of times under hundreds of names. Barravox keeps the turning and adds the thing those versions leave out: a cost. The moment fluid has a pressure and every cell spends some of it, a connected network stops being the answer and becomes only the first half of it — the second half is whether the number arriving at the far end is the number the tank will take. The eight sectors introduce one idea each, in order: rotation, limited spare parts, branching to two tanks, a pressure ceiling, cracks and weld kits, two fluids crossing, throttling with valves, and finally all of it at once.

Frequently asked questions