Robot Route

How to play Robot Route

Touch controls: Tap the four large direction buttons to add moves and the wide Run program button to run them; every button is at least 52 pixels high and the plot itself needs no tapping at all, so nothing has to be aimed at precisely even on a 320 pixel wide screen.

Keyboard controls: Arrow keys and W A S D add a move in that direction, Backspace removes the last move, N clears the program, Enter or Space runs the program or starts a run from the title or the end screen, P or Escape pauses, R restarts, M toggles sound.

Screen: This game works best in any orientation.

About Robot Route

Robot Route is the one game in the collection where the whole answer is written before anything moves. A hedged plot holds a robot in the top left, a goal tile in the bottom right and two or three harvest tiles in between. The player builds a program of up to fourteen moves as a row of letters, and only when Run program is pressed does the robot walk the list.

Because nothing moves while the program is being written, the puzzle is about holding the whole route in mind rather than about reacting. Every plot in the run was checked by searching the plot's state space for the shortest complete route, so the five plots need ten to twelve moves each and the fourteen move program is always enough with room to spare.