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Dice Maze

Dice Maze

Tumble a die across the grid and land on each numbered square with that number face up. The route and the rotation are the same problem.

How to play

A die sits on a five by six grid. Tap any square next to it and the die tumbles onto that square, turning one quarter turn as it goes, so the number on top changes with every move. Dashed squares are walls and cannot be entered. You can always roll back the way you came, so you can never get stuck.

Four gold squares are numbered one to four. Visit them in that order, and the die has to land on each one with that number facing up. Arriving on the right square with the wrong face does nothing at all, so you have to plan the turn as well as the path. Once all four are collected, roll out through the blue exit to finish the board.

Opposite faces of a standard die always add up to seven, so the face on top is fully decided by the route you took to get there. A detour of two squares and back, or a loop around a wall, will leave you on the same square with a different number showing, and that is usually how you fix a face that came out wrong.

A run is five boards. Every board is solved by a search before it is shown to you, so the shortest possible number of moves is known exactly, and that number is the par printed above the grid. Your score is the total number of moves you spend over par across all five boards, so lower is better and zero is a perfect run.

Tips & strategy

Learn the two moves that change the top face without changing where you stand. Rolling out and back along the same line returns the die exactly as it was, which is useless. Rolling around a two by two square — right, down, left, up — brings you home with a different number on top, and rolling around it the other way gives you yet another. Those little loops cost four moves each and are the main tool for arriving with the face you need, so count them into your route rather than discovering them at the last square.

Work the number you need backwards. If the next target wants a three on top, ask which face has to be on top one square earlier, for each of the four directions you could enter from. Because opposite faces add to seven, entering a square from the north means the face that was pointing south is now on top. Two or three steps of that kind of backward reasoning usually pins down the exact square you should approach from, and then you only have to get to that square with the right orientation, which is an easier question.

The par is the honest measure, not the move count. A board with more walls often has a higher par because the die is forced the long way around, so a twenty six move board is not worse play than an eighteen move board. Since only the moves over par are scored, a board where you found the intended line costs you nothing at all, and one careless wrong face at the last target can cost eight in loops. Slow down on the fourth target especially — by then the die has been turning for twenty moves and it is easy to misremember which number is on the far side.

The small grey digits on the die are not decoration. The number at the top edge of the die is the face pointing north and the one at the right edge is the face pointing east, which means you can read two moves ahead without turning the die over in your head. If you roll north, the north digit becomes the new top. If you roll east, the east digit does. Getting into the habit of reading those two before you tap is the single biggest cut to your score.