How to Create Number Trail Puzzles in Puzzle Maker Pro

Summary:
Number Trail puzzles are created in Puzzle Maker Pro by choosing a grid size and difficulty, generating, and exporting the puzzle with its matching solution. This tutorial shows how to make your first puzzle and export publish-ready pages.

Overview

Number Trail is the “Zip”-style path puzzle: ordered numbered anchors plus a few walls, solved with one continuous route through every cell. This tutorial walks through creating one in Puzzle Maker Pro, from opening the module to exporting a print-ready puzzle and solution. New to the puzzle itself? Read How Number Trail Puzzles Work first.

Required Modules

Puzzle Maker Pro – Number Trail
Puzzle Maker Pro – Number Trail Productivity Edition, required only for Time Saver, batch creation, and the JSON and HTML outputs

A free demo of every module is available, so you can try Number Trail before buying.

Preparation

No word lists or images are needed. For your first puzzle, a 7×7 grid at Medium difficulty is a comfortable starting point. Each puzzle is generated guess-free with exactly one solution.

Choose the Main Settings

On the Settings tab, set the two options that define the puzzle:

Grid size: the square board, from 4×4 to 12×12 (default 7). Larger grids give longer routes and take more time to solve; smaller grids work well for beginner collections.
Difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard, or Expert. Higher difficulty raises the anchor count and wall density, so the route needs more deduction.

Set the Quantity and Preview

Set the Quantity (how many puzzles to generate), then click Next Preview to create a sample. Each puzzle is unique, and Puzzle Maker Pro builds the matching solution at the same time. Review the size, difficulty, and layout, and adjust the settings before generating a larger batch.

The solution image always shows the completed trail — there is no separate “show solution” toggle, because the path is the answer.

Style the Puzzle

Number Trail uses the shared style panel (canvas, cell background, cell border, and the anchor-number font) plus two controls specific to this module, on the Style tab:

Solution Line — the colour and thickness of the trail drawn on the solution page.
Walls — the colour and thickness of the walls, shown on both the puzzle and the solution.

A Crop puzzle to clue cells option removes the outer margin for a tight board. For full styling guidance use the shared styling tutorial linked below.

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. Number Trail offers the
same three formulas — Grid Size, Grid Size + Difficulty, and Difficulty — under three name prefixes. The
examples below are for a 7×7 Medium puzzle:

Number Trail Grid Size — e.g. “Number Trail 7×7”
Number Trail Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Number Trail 7×7 – Medium”
Number Trail Difficulty — e.g. “Number Trail Medium”
Grid Size — e.g. “7×7”
Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “7×7 – Medium”
Difficulty — e.g. “Medium”
Zip Grid Size — e.g. “Zip 7×7” (Zip is the puzzle’s LinkedIn name)
Zip Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Zip 7×7 – Medium”
Zip Difficulty — e.g. “Zip Medium”
Custom — your own title text, used exactly as typed

The same options are available for the puzzle Description (the default reads “Draw a single path that visits the numbers in order and passes through every cell 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 Productivity Edition you can also export JSON and HTML output (exported HTML plus a ZIP for the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin) for interactive web play. Number Trail does not use Interactive PDF or Puzzle Slides — the trail itself is the answer, so fillable-cell formats do not fit.

Outcome

You can now create individual Number Trail puzzles with matching solutions 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, set up Smart Titles, batch with Time Saver, or build books, use the shared tutorials below rather than repeating those steps here.