Rules for From Here to Here

courtesy of Cheryl Pappademas Berman

This is a simple pencil‑and‑paper path game played by Aromanian (Vlach) families. The board is a rectangle of 20 hand‑drawn dots arranged in 5 columns by 4 rows on a sheet of paper. Two players take turns: one chooses a starting dot and a target dot for the other, and the other player must draw a continuous line connecting those two dots. The line may pass  around the dots,  and may never cross or touch any line or dot already on the pager. As more paths are added, the board slowly “fills up,” and it becomes harder to find a legal route. A player who is given a pair of dots and cannot find a way to connect them without crossing an existing line loses the game.

My grandmother knew, saw, or intuited the basic idea of “make a path between these two points without crossing any lines” (a very natural puzzle idea).

She drew a simple 5×4 array of circles as a convenient “board.”

Over time, this became our shared game, but it never got a formal name or written rules.

The concept belongs to a broad family of path‑drawing puzzles, but the exact version we played was most likely her own creation and adaptation of her own childhood family game.

The page shown here is the final game we played, around the time I was twenty, which I’ve kept safely in a scrapbook ever since as a reminder of her patience, laughter, and the quiet time we shared over these little dots and lines.