Drag pieces · tap a piece to turn it
The classic seven-piece puzzle against the clock. Drag, turn and mirror two big triangles, a medium one, two small ones, a square and a parallelogram until they fill the dark silhouette — then do it again, faster.
Drag a piece to move it and tap it to turn it 45° clockwise. The ↺ Turn button turns the selected piece 45° the other way and ⇋ Mirror flips it over. Fill the dark silhouette with all seven pieces before the timer runs out.
The seven pieces are the traditional set cut from one square: two large triangles, one medium triangle, two small triangles, one square and one parallelogram. Every silhouette is built from exactly these seven pieces with no gaps and no overlaps, so it always has a solution. The parallelogram is the only piece whose mirror image is a different shape; mirroring a triangle or the square just looks like another turn.
When you let go of a piece, the corner nearest to a corner of the outline or of another piece clicks onto it if it is within about 14 pixels, so pieces fit together exactly. A level is cleared as soon as the pieces cover the outline — any arrangement that fills it counts, not only the one the puzzle was built from. Up to 1 percent of the outline may stay uncovered and up to 1 percent may spill over, which forgives tiny slips.
On early levels some of the inner cuts are drawn as faint dashed lines: five pieces on level 1, four on level 2, and one fewer each level until level 6, where the silhouette is solid. Each level has its own timer of 100 seconds minus 4 seconds per level — 96 seconds on level 1, 60 on level 10, 20 on level 20 and only 4 on level 24 — so no run can go past 24 levels. The clock for level 1 starts when you tap to start; later levels start the moment they appear.
Your Hall of Fame score is the number of levels cleared times 100,000 plus the time you had left on every cleared level, in tenths of a second. Two runs that clear the same number of levels are ranked by how fast they were.
Place the two large triangles first. Together they cover half the silhouette, and there are usually only a few places where a shape that big can fit at all — a wide, solid region of the outline almost always holds one of them. Once they are down, the five smaller pieces have far fewer places left to go.
Read the corners. A sharp 45° point in the outline can only be the tip of a triangle or the sharp corner of the parallelogram, and a clean 90° corner is a triangle's right angle or a corner of the square. A thin pointed spike is very often a small triangle or the parallelogram; a flat end two units wide is a natural home for the small triangle's long side or the square standing on a corner.
Use the areas. Taking a small triangle as 1, the medium triangle, the square and the parallelogram are each 2, and each large triangle is 4. Two small triangles can always rebuild the medium triangle, the square or the parallelogram, so when a region looks like the square but the square is already used, try the two small triangles instead.
The tangram is an old Chinese puzzle that became a craze in Europe and America in the early 1800s, and thousands of figures have been published since. The same seven pieces can make very different shapes, so if you are stuck, take the piece that feels most certain out again — on later levels the timer leaves no room for a stubborn first guess.