Summary:
Country Tour puzzles are created in Puzzle Maker Pro by choosing a board size and difficulty, generating, and exporting the puzzle with its matching solution. This tutorial shows how to make your first puzzle, optionally colour the regions, and export publish-ready pages.
Overview
Country Tour is a loop-logic puzzle: one closed loop visits every cell and enters and leaves each bold region exactly once. This tutorial walks through creating one in Puzzle Maker Pro, from opening the module to exporting a print-ready puzzle and solution. The module uses the same Settings / Style / Titles layout as every Puzzle Maker Pro puzzle, so if you have used another module the flow will feel familiar. New to the puzzle itself? Read How Country Tour Puzzles Work first.
Required Modules
- Puzzle Maker Pro – Country Tour
- Country Tour comes in Creative and Productivity editions. Productivity adds Time Saver and Puzzle Book Studio for full-book batch creation. The optional Interactive add-on (available on either edition) adds JSON, HTML output, and Puzzle Slides — see Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
A free demo of every module is available, so you can try Country Tour before buying.
Preparation
No word lists or images are needed — the regions are generated for you. For your first puzzle, an 8×8 board at Medium difficulty is a comfortable starting point. Each puzzle is generated with exactly one solution, and Puzzle Maker Pro builds the matching solution image at the same time.
Choose the Main Settings
On the Settings tab, set the options that define the puzzle:
- Width and Height: the board size in cells, each from 4 to 12 (default 8). Width and height are independent, so you can make square boards (8×8, 10×10) or rectangular ones (12×8 landscape, 8×12 portrait). A loop needs an even number of cells, so an all-odd request (for example 9×9) is nudged to the nearest even board for you.
- Difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard, or Expert. Difficulty sets the size of the regions — Easy uses mostly small regions that pin the loop tightly, while Expert uses larger regions that demand more look-ahead.
- Quantity: how many puzzles to make in one run. Keep it at 1 while you dial in the look; raise it for a batch.
Built-in presets. The presets toolbar offers six ready-made starting points (their bracketed names are reserved built-ins): [Easy 8×8], [Classic 8×8], [Challenge 10×10], [Expert 12×12], [Landscape 12×8], and [Portrait 8×12]. Pick one as a fast starting point, then adjust.
Generate and Preview
Set the Quantity to 1 while you dial in the size and look, then generate a preview. Each puzzle is unique, and Puzzle Maker Pro builds the matching solution at the same time. When the look is right, raise the Quantity and the same settings produce a whole batch of unique puzzles — single and batch are the same workflow, just a different number.
Rectangular boards print well for landscape books and two-up layouts:
Style the Puzzle
Country Tour uses the shared style panel on the Style tab. The controls that matter for this puzzle are:
- Canvas and Cell fill colours — the page background and the cell interiors.
- Cell border (grid line) — the thin lines between cells.
- Region border — the bold lines that mark the regions (the clue). Keep these heavier than the grid line so the regions read clearly.
- Puzzle border — the thick outer frame.
- Solution line — the colour and thickness of the loop drawn on the solution image (blue by default).
- Use Region Fill Colors (optional) — off by default. Turn it on to shade the regions with soft colours; Puzzle Maker Pro colours them so that no two touching regions share a colour. The colours appear on both the puzzle and the solution.
For full styling guidance use the shared styling tutorial linked below rather than repeating it here.
Set the Title
On the Titles tab, choose a Smart Title. A Smart Title fills in the puzzle’s own details automatically, so every page in a batch is labelled correctly without retyping. Country Tour offers these options (examples are for an 8×8 Medium puzzle):
- Country Tour GridSize — e.g. “Country Tour 8×8”
- Country Tour Difficulty — e.g. “Country Tour Medium”
- Country Tour Gridsize Difficulty — e.g. “Country Tour 8×8 Medium”
- GridSize — e.g. “8×8”
- Difficulty — e.g. “Medium”
- Gridsize Difficulty — e.g. “8×8 Medium”
- Custom — your own title text, used exactly as typed
The same options are available for the puzzle Description (the default reads “Draw one loop that visits every cell once and enters and leaves each bold region exactly once.”). Smart Titles works the same way in every module — see the Smart Titles tutorial for how it works.
Export Your Puzzle
Export the puzzle and its solution as PNG, JPG, SVG, or PDF for worksheets and books. With the Interactive add-on (available on either edition) you can also export JSON and HTML output (exported HTML plus a ZIP for the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin) for interactive web play, and Puzzle Slides — an interactive PowerPoint where the solver builds the loop by dragging six reusable loop pieces (straights and corners) onto the grid. Country Tour does not use Interactive PDF, because a free-form loop answer cannot be captured with PDF form fields.
Outcome
You can now create individual Country Tour puzzles with matching solutions, optionally colour the regions, and export them for print or web. To produce a whole book of unique puzzles from saved settings, use Time Saver, and assemble finished or mixed books in Puzzle Book Studio (Productivity edition).
To style the puzzle in depth, set up Smart Titles, batch with Time Saver, or build books, use the shared tutorials below rather than repeating those steps here.