Sneak▶Play

Cross the floor without ending a turn in a guard's sightline. Every level is built so that you must stand still at least once.

How to play

You start in one corner and need to reach the green exit in the opposite one. The catch is timing: after every move you make, each guard advances one square along its patrol and then looks three squares ahead. If you are standing in any of those squares when the guards have finished moving, you are spotted.

Tap an arrow to step one square, or WAIT to spend a turn without moving. Waiting is a real move and often the only correct one — the red shading shows what the guards can see right now, but they will have shifted by the time your step resolves, so what matters is where a patrol is heading rather than where it currently stands.

Walls stop movement and also stop sight, which is what makes the levels work. A corridor that is lethal while a guard faces down it becomes completely safe the moment the guard turns at the end of its route, and a doorway behind a wall can be crossed even with a guard two squares away.

Every level is generated and then checked by a solver twice: once to confirm it can be escaped at all, and once with waiting forbidden to confirm that it cannot. Only levels that fail the second check are used, so you are never asked to solve a maze that merely looks like a stealth puzzle.

Being spotted sends you back to the starting corner but leaves the level and the clock alone, so your score is the total time to escape with every mistake included.

Tips & strategy

Read patrols as timetables, not as obstacles. Each guard walks a fixed straight run and turns around at the ends, so its position repeats on a short cycle — usually four, six or eight turns. Once you have watched one full lap you know exactly which turn it will be at each square, and the level stops being about dodging and becomes about arithmetic.

The most useful square on the board is the one directly behind a guard. A patrol only ever looks the way it is walking, so the space it has just left is the safest place on the map for the next few turns. Rather than racing to get past a guard, it is usually faster to step into its wake and travel along behind it.

Watch for the turn at the end of a route. That is the one moment a guard's sightline swings a hundred and eighty degrees, and it is where nearly every level hides its solution: a corridor that is covered for six straight turns opens for exactly one. If you cannot find a safe path, look for the square that is dangerous now but will be behind the guard after its next step.

When you are unsure, wait rather than guess. Getting spotted costs you the whole walk back, while a wasted turn costs a second or two, and because levels are built to require waiting anyway, standing still is far more often correct here than instinct suggests. Move only when you can name the turn on which the square you are stepping into will be clear.