Tile Order

Slide the numbered tiles back into order. On the small boards every route has been searched, so the number on screen is the true fewest moves — and matching it is a perfect run.

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Size

Responsive 640 × 480 800 × 600

Responsive keeps the frame inside your column on a phone. Fixed sizes are easier to drop into an older layout.

HTML to paste

<div style="position:relative;width:100%;aspect-ratio:16/10">
  <iframe src="https://www.gamedavinci.com/embed/tile-order/" title="Tile Order"
    style="position:absolute;inset:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0"
    allow="fullscreen; autoplay; gamepad" loading="lazy"></iframe>
</div>
<p><a href="https://www.gamedavinci.com/game/tile-order/">Tile Order</a> by <a href="https://www.gamedavinci.com/">GameDavinci</a></p>

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Daily challenge

Tile Order serves one puzzle a day, generated from the calendar date — so the board you play is the same board every other player gets. Solve it before the day is out to extend your streak. Your stats stay in this browser; there is nothing to sign up for.

Next puzzle in under 24 hours . See all daily challenges →

About this game

Tile Order is the sliding number puzzle everyone has met at least once: tiles in a frame, one square empty, and the only legal move is to push a tile into the gap. It is the oldest puzzle on this site and the one most often shipped without any way to tell whether you played it well. This version fixes that. On the three-by-three and four-by-four boards the game searches every possible route before you see the board and shows the true smallest number of moves that can solve it, so the target is not an estimate and not the route the shuffle happened to use — nothing shorter exists, and matching it is a perfect run. On the larger boards no honest claim like that can be made, because proving a five-by-five optimal is beyond any browser, so those boards show a beatable par from the game's own solver and say so with a different word rather than quietly using the same one. The other thing that goes wrong in sliding puzzles is fixed too: half of all tile arrangements cannot be solved at all, and the usual approach is to shuffle freely and then repair the board with a parity rule, which is exactly the kind of fact that gets stored in two places and drifts. Here every board is built by walking the gap away from the solved position, so a route home always exists because one was just walked, and there is no parity rule anywhere in the game. Tap a tile anywhere along the gap's row or column and the whole run slides at once, which is what makes the big boards bearable on a phone. Undo is unlimited and free, boards run from three-by-three up to six-by-six, and a fresh four-by-four arrives every day for everybody with a streak and a spoiler-free share.

Controls

Tap any tile in the same row or column as the empty square and everything between it and the gap slides at once.

Touch

Tap a tile to slide it, or tap further down the row to push several.
Swipe in any direction to slide the one tile next to the gap.

Keyboard

Arrow keys or W, A, S, D slide one tile.
Z undoes.

How to play

Put the tiles back in order, left to right and top to bottom, with the empty square last.

Moving tiles

Only a tile touching the empty square can move, and it moves into it.
Tapping further along the gap's row or column pushes the whole run at once.
A run of three tiles counts as three moves, but undoes as one tap.

The number to beat

On 3×3 and 4×4 it is marked Fewest and is the proven minimum — finish on it for a perfect run.
On 5×5 and 6×6 it is marked Par and is the shortest route the game itself found, so beating it is possible.
Undo is unlimited and costs nothing but the moves it gives back.

Read the full Tile Order rules and strategy →