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Sliding Number Puzzle: Solve the 3×3 Board
Learn legal tile moves, the solved layout and practical planning for the eight-tile sliding puzzle.
Play nowKnow the goal
Arrange tiles one, two and three across the top, four, five and six across the middle, then seven and eight along the bottom with the empty space last. Only a tile beside the empty space can move into it. Diagonal tiles cannot move. Tap a neighboring tile to slide it; each legal slide increases the move counter.
Plan a short route
Start by deciding where tile one should go, then consider which empty-space position lets it move toward that destination. The empty space is your workspace. Moving it around a small loop can change the order of nearby tiles without requiring a random series of taps. Picture two moves ahead before making a difficult choice.
Protect useful progress
Working toward the top row can give you a clear intermediate target. Be willing to move a correct tile temporarily if it creates room for another, but notice when you keep repeating the same loop. When stuck, pause and describe the exact tile you want to move and the empty square it needs.
Shuffle or restart
Shuffle creates a solvable board through legal moves from the current board. Restart returns to the starting layout of the current puzzle. The game awards 100 points for solving within twenty moves, then subtracts a point for each extra move down to a minimum of ten. Different shuffled boards can have different difficulty.