What is ZEPHYR — Hot-Air Balloon Wind Puzzle
A hot-air balloon has no rudder. It goes where the air goes, and a pilot's only real choice is which layer of air to sit in. ZEPHYR lays that idea flat: the board is a grid of cells, each holding an arrow for the wind blowing there. Tap a cell and its arrow turns ninety degrees clockwise, but every turn spends one gust, and the gusts are counted out for you at the start of each flight. When the chain of arrows looks right you press Launch, and the balloon drifts from cell to cell, obeying whatever arrow it happens to stand on.
A flight ends when the balloon reaches the golden pad, sails off the edge of the chart, enters a thundercloud, or circles until it is declared lost. Land safely and the next chart opens, usually a little larger: five by five for the first two flights, seven by seven from the ninth. Stars sit along the way and pay points, golden padlocks hold some arrows fixed from the third flight, and from the fifth a pair of portals links two cells off the route. Voyage keeps going until you finally crash; the Daily Challenge is five flights on one shared chart.
How to play
- Tap or click a cell to turn its wind arrow ninety degrees clockwise. Each turn spends one gust, and the counter on the right of the bar shows how many remain.
- Trace the chain of arrows from the circled starting cell and make sure it reaches the golden pad without crossing a thundercloud or running off the grid.
- Press Launch, or the space bar, and the balloon follows the winds cell by cell, taking any star it passes over on its way to the pad.
- Land to bank the flight and open the next chart. Reset, or the R key, restores every arrow and refunds all the gusts spent on this flight.
Strategies that work
- Arrows wearing a golden padlock cannot be turned, and that is help rather than hindrance: the generator locks them only after aiming them along the route it built. Read them as signposts, join each padlock to the one before and the one after, and the intended path usually appears on its own.
- Arrows turn clockwise only: east, south, west, north, back to east. Nudging a wind one step anticlockwise therefore costs three taps and three gusts, not one. When two routes look equally good, count the taps each needs and take the clockwise one; that alone often saves four or five gusts.
- Each gust still in hand when you land is worth thirty points, and each star sixty. A star costing one extra rotation gains thirty, one costing two breaks even, one costing three or more loses points. Chase the full set only when the stars sit near your line.
- Thunderclouds are never placed on the route the chart was built around, nor within one cell of your starting square. A line that runs into a storm means you have drifted off the intended path. Back up to the last arrow you trust and try the other branch.
- A closed ring of arrows is fatal: once the balloon has taken twice as many steps as the grid has cells, the flight is lost and the run ends. Follow the chain before launching and check it terminates. Portals sit off-route too, so being teleported means you strayed.
A little history
ZEPHYR was written for Puzzle-Me and has no older ancestor, but it borrows from two places. The first is the family of rotation puzzles, where you turn tiles to build a continuous path for something that moves by itself; you never touch the traveller, only the world it crosses. The second is real ballooning. A balloon cannot be steered directly, and pilots change course by climbing or descending into a layer of air moving the way they want, because wind direction and speed vary with altitude. ZEPHYR spreads those stacked layers flat across a board.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything to play?
No. ZEPHYR runs in the browser, with a mouse on a computer or by tapping on a phone, with nothing to download and no account to create. Your best score, stars, streak and achievements live in your own browser's storage, so clearing site data resets them.
Is the Daily Challenge the same for everyone?
Yes. The chart is built from a number derived from the date in UTC, so everyone who opens the Daily Challenge on the same calendar day gets the same grids, pads, stars and storms. It changes at midnight UTC, not at your local midnight.
How is the score worked out?
Landing pays a hundred points on the first flight and twenty more on each flight after it, plus thirty for every unspent gust and seventy-five for collecting all of a chart's stars. Stars are sixty each. A crash keeps everything banked so far.
