Wall Pipe

Wall Pipe, released by Soleau Software in 1993, is a real-time puzzle game built on the idea Pipe Mania made famous: water is about to start flowing from a source, and you have to lay down a pipeline for it before it gets there.

The catch is that you never choose your pieces. They arrive in a queue — you always take the first one, with only the next three visible — so you build with whatever happens to come: straights, elbows, junctions. You pick each part up with the mouse and drop it on the wall wherever it is needed. At the start of a round you get forty seconds of calm to plan and lay foundations; then the water starts moving and you are building just ahead of the advancing flow.

That is exactly where the pleasant tension comes from. Sooner or later every plan collides with a run of useless pieces and improvisation begins: routing the pipeline the long way round, building loops, sacrificing a corner of the wall as a dumping ground for parts you cannot use yet. None of this is groundbreaking, and Pipe Mania did it all first, but the craft is solid and the rules take exactly one round to understand.

Soleau Software was precisely this kind of workshop: small logic games spread as shareware, modest in ambition but clean and legible in design, and Wall Pipe is one of the more pleasant items in that line. Expect nothing beyond quick rounds lasting a few minutes — though games built this way have a habit of turning into "one more round" and stealing a whole hour anyway.

You can play it on oldgame.cz right in the browser, nothing to install.