Tango vs Zip: Which One Is Harder?

Both are logic puzzles on a grid, and that is where the similarity ends. One asks you what belongs in each cell. The other asks you in what order to walk through them.

What each game actually asks

Tango is a filling puzzle. You place a sun or a moon in all 36 cells of a 6×6 grid. Every row and column must end up with exactly three of each, no more than two identical symbols may touch in a line, and cells joined by an = must match while cells joined by an × must differ.

Zip is a path puzzle. Some cells carry numbers. You draw a single continuous line that starts at 1, visits 2, then 3, and so on to the last number, moving only up, down, left or right. Two extra constraints do the real work: the line may never cross itself, and when you finish, every square on the board must be part of the path. Harder boards add walls that the line cannot pass through. LinkedIn added Zip in March 2025 as its fifth thinking game, alongside Queens, Tango, Pinpoint and Crossclimb.

Where the difficulty actually lives

The interesting difference is not which one is harder in the abstract. It is when you find out you were wrong.

In Tango, a bad symbol usually violates something visible almost immediately — a line ends up with four suns, or three identical symbols line up. The board tells you within a move or two. The cost of a mistake is low, so Tango rewards steady attention and punishes carelessness.

In Zip, a route can look perfectly reasonable for twenty cells and then leave you stranded: the numbers are still in order, the line has not crossed itself, but there are squares in a corner you can no longer reach. Nothing was illegal along the way. The mistake happened far earlier than the moment you discovered it. That makes Zip punish commitment — you have to think about the whole board before you draw much of anything.

That is why "which is harder" gets different answers from different people. If you like problems that decompose into small independent deductions, Tango feels easier. If you think spatially and plan routes naturally, Zip feels easier.

Cognitive load: local versus global

Tango is a local puzzle. Almost every deduction concerns one line or one pair of neighbouring cells. You can solve a corner of the board, forget about it entirely, and move on. Very little has to stay in working memory.

Zip is a global puzzle. No segment of your path is correct on its own — it is only correct relative to every square the line still has to reach. You cannot finalise the first third and stop thinking about it, because the last third may prove it wrong.

This is also why Tango scales well to unlimited play and Zip does not, in practice. A Tango board can be picked up and put down mid-solve. A Zip board mostly has to be held in one sitting.

Which should you play first?

If you are new to either: start with Tango. Each of its four rules is one sentence, the feedback is immediate, and you can build confidence on a corner of the board without a plan for the whole thing. Zip asks for whole-board thinking from the very first move, which is a harder place to start when you are still learning what the puzzle wants.

If you already play both, they train genuinely different muscles — constraint satisfaction versus route planning — so there is no redundancy in playing both. They just are not substitutes for each other.

The one thing they share

Both guarantee a single solution reachable by deduction alone. No guessing, no luck, no partial credit. That is the whole appeal of this category of puzzle: being stuck always means there is something you have not seen yet, never that you got unlucky.

It is also the harder half to build. Our difficulty page explains how boards here are screened so that "hard" means deeper reasoning rather than fewer clues.

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