The arrow puzzle guide
A deeper look at the logic behind Arrow Escape — useful if you want to understand why a board is hard, not just how to beat it.
Runways and blockers
Every arrow has a runway: the straight line from its head to the edge of the board. An arrow is free when its runway is empty. If another arrow touches the runway, that arrow is a blocker. Because a launched arrow follows its own path, its body never collides with anything — only the runway can be blocked.
The blocking graph
Draw a dot for each arrow and an edge from every arrow to each of its blockers. That picture is the board's blocking graph. Solving the puzzle means removing the dots in an order where each dot has no remaining outgoing edges when you remove it.
Why there are no dead ends
Removing an arrow can only empty runways — it never adds an obstacle. So once an arrow is free, it stays free. That means the order of free arrows never matters: you cannot paint yourself into a corner by removing the "wrong" free arrow. The only way to fail is to tap a blocked one.
A board is unsolvable only if its blocking graph has a cycle — for example, two arrows pointing at each other's bodies:
How the levels are built
Arrow Escape builds every generated level by reverse construction. Arrows are added one at a time to an empty board, and each new arrow must have a clear runway at the moment it is placed. New arrows may sit on older arrows' runways — that is what creates blocking. Removing the arrows in the reverse of the order they were placed is therefore always a valid solution.
After generation, each level is checked twice more: an independent solver that only looks at grid occupancy confirms a full solution exists, and the solution is replayed tap by tap through the game's geometric collision engine. Both must agree before a level ships. All 1,000 levels pass these checks.
Measuring difficulty
Arrow count alone is a poor measure of difficulty. Arrow Escape scores each level using:
- Dependency depth — how many rounds of "remove every free arrow" it takes to clear the board.
- Initial freedom — the share of arrows you can remove at the start. Fewer choices means more reading.
- Average choices — how many free arrows are available on a typical move.
- Coverage and red arrows — dense boards are harder to read, and red arrows punish guessing.
Beginner levels have depths of 2–7; extreme levels reach 20. Levels are ordered so the difficulty rating never goes down from one level to the next. See the numbers for a specific board on its level guide, e.g. level 500 or level 1000.
Reading a board like a pro
- Find all free arrows (the first layer).
- For each blocked arrow, note its nearest blocker.
- Prefer free arrows that are the nearest blocker of many others — they are the "keys".
- Repeat. Depth is just the number of times you go round this loop.