Fred Frauhiger is the head plumber at Knarly's Water Works. Renegade vandals from a competing company, Krasshopper's Knifty Water Works, have broken into Knarly's factory and scrambled all of the parts to Fred's new project, the Closed Circuit Septic System. Fred must now reconstruct the only existing prototype systems.

Knarly is a new type of logic puzzle. The picture above shows a simple puzzle (on the left) and its solution (on...you guessed it...the right). You're presented with clue tiles containing sections of pipe, and your task is to fit those sections of pipe together to form a "closed circuit" of plumbing. The clue tiles to the left of the puzzle must remain on their same row as they are placed into the puzzle, and clue tiles above the puzzle must remain in their same column as they're placed into the puzzle. None of the clue tiles may be rotated or flipped. All of the tiles are used to complete the puzzle. Each puzzle is guaranteed to have only one possible solution. Puzzles come in sizes 4x4, 5x5, 6x6, 7x7, and 8x8.

WHAT-IF PUZZLES

The Knarly Works program can make many "direct logic" deductions about which pieces have to be placed where, but will frequently reach a point where it has to use "what-if logic" to proceed (see the Help screens in the game for more information regarding "what-if logic"). This doesn't mean that YOU will need to use what-if logic all the times that the computer does (you may be smarter than the computer... :-), and it doesn't mean that you will have to use as many what-if deductions as the computer does to solve a given puzzle. However, the number of what-ifs required by the PROGRAM to solve a puzzle can be a ROUGH indicator of the difficulty of the puzzle.

Some folks have expressed interest in knowing what the "needed what-ifs" counts are for the various puzzles, so I've generated an ASCII text file (.CSV, comma-separated-values) for each puzzle size 4-8, which contains a puzzle number and a what-ifs-needed count on each line. If a puzzle number is not listed, then the what-ifs-needed count for that puzzle is 0. You can read these files in a text editor or word processor, or if you wish to sort them by the what-ifs-needed counts, you can import them into a spreadsheet program and sort on the second column.

WHATIFKW - a self-extracting ZIP archive containing WI_READ.TXT, WHATIF4.CSV, WHATIF5.CSV, WHATIF6.CSV, WHATIF7.CSV and WHATIF8.CSV. Size 4 puzzles have relatively few puzzles that require what-if logic. Size 8 puzzles have relatively few that DON'T require what-if logic. The sizes in between are... well, in between. :-)

Additional Files

ADVERT - an "Everett Kaser Software 'advertisment'" image set from Grant Fikes. (June 10, 2004)
TROMUSIC - MIDI files sent in by Judy Spence to use with her TROLLS image set (that's included in the licensed version) as background music. By the way, she also gave the trolls names:

Dunder - blue hair
Fleer - yellow hair
Moset - green hair
Pypher - orange hair
Rusket - red hair
Snod - purple hair

LAYERS - This ZIP file contains TEMPLATE.PSP, which is ONLY of interest to those of you who have Paint Shop Pro version 6 or greater, know how to use the "layers" feature of it, and want to create your own KW image set with other colors, textures, backgrounds, etc. This will let you do it more easily, as the major components of the KW image set file are separated onto different layers, and the pipes themselves are a flat gray, making it easy to select them with the "magic selector wand" and then perform whatever "image effects" you want upon them (or replace them entirely with something else).
LAYERS5 - Same as above but saved in Paint Shop Pro version 5 compatible format.