—This paper presents a comparative study of the XY – routing protocol in the square grid “S” examined herein with the XY Z protocol in the triangular grid “T” examined elsewhere, both with toroidal connections and N nodes. The routing problem (also called multiple target searching) is performed in a partitioned cellular automata network with agents (or messages) moving from sources to targets, preferably on their minimal routes. The network in S consists of N nodes with 4 buffers per node. Buffers with the same names are connected to their neighboring nodes via unidirectional links. Each buffer may host an agent and each agent situated in a buffer has a computed direction defining the new buffer in the adjacent node. Two scenarios are examined: (i) N −1 agents are moving to a common target (also called “all-to-one gathering”) (ii) N/2 agents are moving to N/2 targets. It is shown that in both cases the T grid