About Arrow Pictures

Number puzzles drawn as pictures. Each color of arrow is a rule, like “add 4” or “times 2”, and every arrow of that color follows the same rule. Work out the missing numbers, crack the mystery rules, or draw arrows of your own.

How to play

• Dots hold numbers. Click an empty dot and type its number with the keypad or your keyboard.
• Arrows are rules. When a rule shows a ?, it’s a mystery: look at arrows whose two ends you know to work it out.
• Brown, gray and white arrows are made of other colors: “brown means scarlet then yellow” is one arrow that does both steps. Click one to take it step by step.
• Draw puzzles hand you a pen: find the arrows that are missing, or build a road of arrows from one number to another.
• Stuck? Hint gives three levels of help: where to look, how to work it out, then the answer. Check marks anything that doesn’t fit.
• Stars show how hard a puzzle is. Every theme starts at one star and climbs to five.

The puzzles

The puzzles come in themes, each climbing from one star to five.

Where it comes from

Arrow pictures come from CSMP, the Comprehensive School Mathematics Program, a math curriculum from the 1970s and 1980s. CSMP taught arithmetic through pictures: colored arrows for relations like “is 2 more than”, the Papy Minicomputer for place value, and string diagrams for sorting. Many activities here follow its lessons, like labeling the dots on an arrow road, drawing every missing arrow, and building a road from 2 to 23 with +5 and −2 arrows. The CSMP teacher’s guides are still online.

This site isn’t affiliated with CSMP. Every puzzle here is new, most made by a puzzle generator and some by hand, and every one is checked by a solver that proves it has exactly one answer.

Your progress

Your answers and checkmarks are saved in this browser, on this device. There’s no account, and nothing is sent anywhere. That also means progress doesn’t follow you to another device or browser, and it’s lost if you clear this site’s data or play in a private window.

Who made it

Arrow Pictures was made for a young puzzle fan. Every theme was tried by our test player, and the puzzles changed whenever something didn’t work.

The code is open source under the MIT license, on GitHub.