Scramble
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Moves
0
The 2x2x2 twisty cube, on a three-minute clock. The first cube is two turns from solved, the next is three, and it keeps getting one turn deeper every time you finish one — so everybody solves the first few and nobody solves them all. Two views are drawn at once, from opposite corners, so all twenty-four stickers are on screen and nothing is hidden behind the cube.
Six buttons turn three faces: U is the top layer, R is the right layer, F is the front layer, and the primed versions turn the same layer the other way. That is all you need. A 2x2x2 has no fixed centre pieces, so the back-bottom-left corner never has to move — treat it as the anchor and build everything relative to it.
The top drawing is the cube seen from the front-top-right, and the bottom drawing is the same cube seen from the back-bottom-left. Between them every sticker is visible, so you never have to rotate the cube to check a face. When all six faces are one colour each, the cube counts and the next one appears one turn deeper.
The scramble depth and the fewest possible turns for the current cube are both shown, along with how many turns you have used. Beating the listed number is impossible; matching it means you found an optimal solution.
The clock runs for three minutes and does not stop between cubes, so hesitating costs you. Your score is the number of cubes solved.
For the first few cubes, do not think in algorithms — just look. At depth two or three the wrong pieces are obvious, and undoing what you can see is faster than recalling a sequence. The habit worth building early is checking both drawings before every turn, because half the information about the cube is in the lower one.
From about depth six onward, switch to building a layer. Pick the anchor corner at the back-bottom-left, then place the three corners that share its bottom colour, so that the whole bottom layer is one colour and the side stickers around it match up in pairs. Only then worry about the top. Trying to fix everything at once is what makes people lose thirty seconds on a cube that was eight turns away.
The single most useful sequence to memorise is R U R' U', repeated. Six repetitions return any cube to where it started, so you can never get lost using it, and one or two repetitions is enough to cycle the top corners without disturbing a finished bottom layer. If you learn nothing else, learn to recognise when the top needs one repetition and when it needs two.
Every position of this cube is at most eleven turns from solved if you count a half turn as one move, and fourteen if you count only quarter turns like the buttons here. That means a cube that looks hopeless never is. When the counter shows you have already used more turns than the listed minimum, stop and look for a pair of pieces that are already correct rather than continuing to churn.