What is SAGATIDE — Viking Tide-Weaving Puzzle
SAGATIDE is a puzzle about committing to a plan before you can watch it fail. Your longship sits on a small sea — five squares across in the first tides, six or seven later — and somewhere on it is a harbour. You never steer. You are dealt a hand of rune cards, each one a single step north, east, south or west, and you carve them into the Wyrd Line in the order you want them. Press SAIL and the ship reads that line from left to right and lives it out, rune by rune, with no way to correct anything once it is under way.
The sea is not passive. A current pushes the ship one tile along its blue chevrons and a whirlpool spits it out along its golden arrow, and neither movement costs a rune. The ship keeps drifting for as long as it keeps landing on moving water, so one well-aimed step can carry it across half the board for free. Golden runes on the water are worth sixty points each and are picked up during a drift as readily as during a step. Three shields cover three failed weaves: run out of runes before you touch the harbour and one shatters and the tide restarts unchanged.
How to play
- Tap rune cards from your hand to carve them into the Wyrd Line. Each rune is one step in one direction, and the small arrow on the card repeats it.
- Press SAIL and the ship walks the line in order. Tap a carved rune to take it back, or use Undo and Clear before you sail.
- Reaching the harbour ends the voyage there, and every rune still in the line stays unspent. Bumping a rock or the shore burns a rune without moving the ship.
- Running out of runes short of the harbour shatters a shield and restarts the same tide. Lose all three shields and the saga ends and your score is posted.
Strategies that work
- The par under the board is the length of the Norns' winding path, not of the best route. A tide with a par of fourteen is often sailed in five or six runes, because the ship can cut straight across water the path curled around. Every rune left unspent pays forty.
- Drifting is free. After each rune the ship keeps moving on its own while it keeps landing on a current or a whirlpool, and none of those tiles charges you. Find a chevron chain aimed at the harbour and spend runes only on reaching its first tile.
- A golden rune pays sixty, and the extra rune spent reaching it costs the forty you would have banked by leaving it unspent. One extra step for one golden rune nets twenty and is worth taking; two extra steps for it lose twenty. Count the detour first.
- A bump is the costliest mistake here. The rune is spent, the ship does not move, and the eighty-point perfect-weave bonus is gone, so one collision costs around a hundred and twenty points. A rune aimed off the board edge bumps exactly like a rock.
- Read a whirlpool's golden arrow before stepping onto it. It can point straight back at the tile you came from and undo the rune you just spent, and if it aims into a rock it does nothing at all. Whirlpools never sit on the Norns' path.
A little history
SAGATIDE was written for puzzle-me.com; there is no older original behind it. It belongs to the family of puzzles in which you write a whole sequence of instructions in advance and then hand control over, unable to intervene while it runs. The sea is what makes it its own thing: currents and whirlpools advance the ship without spending an instruction, so the puzzle becomes a search for the cheapest way onto one. Wyrd is an Old English word for fate, and the Norns are the three figures who shape it in Norse myth.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Daily Tide the same for everyone?
Yes. It is built from a seed derived from the date in UTC, so every player in the world sails the same six-by-six sea, the same rocks and the same hand of runes that day. The countdown on the menu runs to midnight UTC, when the next tide replaces it.
Do I need to install anything, and does it work on a phone?
No install and no account. It runs in the browser, and the board, the Wyrd Line and your rune hand all fit a phone screen without scrolling. On a computer the arrow keys carve runes, Backspace undoes, C clears and Enter sails.
How is the score worked out?
The harbour is worth a hundred, each golden rune sixty, and each rune still unspent on arrival forty; a weave with no bumps that stays within par adds eighty more. Higher is better. A saga totals every tide you clear, while a Daily Tide scores that single crossing.
