The game in three steps
- Slide. Tap a tile in line with the gap. Everything between slides too. One tap, one move.
- Match. Make the pattern anywhere, exactly as drawn. Five patterns, one board.
- Score low. Fewest moves wins. Par is the target. Replay freely: only your best counts.
That is the whole game. The rest of this page is each of those lines with a picture.
The board
Five by five: eight red circles, eight yellow triangles, eight green squares, and one gap. Tiles never leave the board and never change colour. The dark bars between some tiles are walls. They are part of the board and stay where they are for the whole run.
One tap is one move
Tap a tile in the gap's row or column. The simplest case is the tile right beside the gap.
A long slide is still one move
This is the rule most new players miss. Tap a tile further along the gap's row or column and every tile between it and the gap slides together. Moving three tiles costs exactly what moving one costs. Nudging them across one at a time would cost three.
Walls
Walls work like the edge of the board: nothing slides through one.
So a tile can be tapped only when the way from it to the gap is clear. Tap a tile with a wall in the way and nothing happens, and nothing is added to your score. Here the gap sits in the middle of the board, and three of the tiles in line with it are shut off.
No tile is ever stuck for good. Move the gap round to the other side of a wall and the tiles there can slide again. Walls only block slides: they have no say in what counts as a pattern.
And they never make a round longer. A run is only published if every round's shortest finish is as short with the walls as it would be without them. Walls take away some of the ways to go wrong. They never stand in the way of the way to go right.
Building a pattern
Each round shows a pattern, such as this line of three:
Make those colours appear in that arrangement anywhere on the board and the round is done. There is no target zone. Here one slide down the gap's column finishes it, and the finished line sits straight across a wall. That is fine.
The pattern has to match exactly as drawn. A row of red, yellow, green does not count if yours reads green, yellow, red, and it does not count turned on its side as a column. Shapes are never rotated or mirrored. A dashed cell in a pattern can be any colour.
Five patterns, one board
A run is five rounds. The board is not reset between them: round two starts from wherever round one left the tiles, and the walls stay put throughout. The small Next preview shows the pattern that is coming.
Par and your score
Par is every round played in the fewest moves, added up. It is set before you start and never changes.
Your score is your total moves across all five rounds. Undo is free, and sliding a tile straight back where it came from cancels the move instead of costing a second one. The one exception is the move that completes a round: that round is banked the moment the pattern appears.
"Par this round", under the pattern, tells you the fewest moves the round needs from the board you started it on. It is worked out once, when the round begins, and it does not change as you slide. Treat it as the round's own par.
When a run ends, each round gets a mark.
Play it again
Only your best run counts, and you can replay as much as you like. That goes for the result card and for your stats. A first attempt well over par is normal. The second is usually much closer, because you now know all five patterns and you know the course. Par is there to be chased.
Three runs a day, three different jobs
The tiers are not the same puzzle with bigger numbers. Each one asks for a different skill. On all three, any shortest finish is the right one: play each round in the fewest moves and you land on par.
Start on easy. When the move counts stop surprising you, read how to use fewer moves.
Free to play, no account needed. Sign up free to keep your scores and streak.