Ice Sliding Puzzle Tips: Solving Boards Fast Against the Clock

Updated October 2026

Ice is a sliding puzzle with a stopwatch attached. You glide across a 7×7 grid until something stops you, and the score is the number of boards you clear in sixty seconds. Because the clock is short, the winners are not the players who can eventually solve any board, but the ones who see the route in the first glance and never waste a slide. This guide explains how every board is generated, which facts about it you can rely on, and a reading method that finds most solutions in a couple of seconds.

What stays the same on every board

The single most useful fact is that the layout is never random in the places that matter most. Your penguin always starts in the top-left corner, and the flag is always in the bottom-right corner. Only the wall blocks change. A swipe or an arrow key sends you in a straight line until the next cell is a wall or the edge of the grid; you cannot stop in the middle of open ice, and passing near the flag does not count. You only clear a board when a slide ends exactly on the flag.

Each touch produces one slide. The game reads the direction once your finger has moved a short distance and then ignores the rest of that swipe, so a long, curving gesture will not chain two moves. Lift and swipe again for the next one. On a keyboard, the arrow keys work the same way.

The timer starts when you press Start, not when the page loads, and it runs on real elapsed time. After each clear there is a half-second pause before the next board appears, and that pause comes out of your sixty seconds.

Two moves you can always check first

Since you start in a corner, sliding up or left does nothing, so your first move is always right or down. The flag sits in the opposite corner, and that has a mirror consequence: a slide up or left can never end on the flag, so your final move is also always right or down. The last slide is either a run to the right along the bottom row or a run down the right-hand column.

Combine those facts and you get a two-move check that takes a moment. If the top row and the right column are both clear, right then down wins. If the left column and the bottom row are both clear, down then right wins. In our simulation of the generator, one of those two routes worked on about 42 percent of first boards. With more walls the shortcut becomes rarer, about 15 percent at ten walls and under 3 percent once the wall count reaches its cap, but it is so quick to check that it should be the first thing your eyes do on every board.

How the boards get harder

The first board has 6 walls. The count follows a fixed formula, six plus four-fifths of the board number rounded down, so most new boards add one block, every fifth board repeats the previous count, and the number stops growing at 20 walls from board 18 onward. Walls are scattered at random, then the game searches every position you could slide into and redraws the board unless the flag can still be reached from all of them. If a wall count keeps failing, it tries one wall fewer, so you never get an unfinishable board.

In our simulation, the shortest solution on early boards was usually 3 moves and sometimes as many as 11. With ten walls the typical shortest route was 4 moves, with a dozen it was 5, and at the cap it was about 6. Long routes are rare but real, so when a board does not crack within a few seconds, switch to the backward reading described next instead of trying slides at random.

Read backward from the flag

When the two-move check fails, work backward instead of forward. Look along the bottom row: find any cell from which a rightward slide would reach the corner with nothing in the way. A wall in that row with open ice to its right creates such a stopping point. Do the same in the right column for downward slides. These are your landing spots.

Next, ask how you can come to rest on one of those landing spots. You stop on a cell only when the next cell in your direction of travel is a wall or the edge. So a landing spot in the bottom row is easy to reach by sliding down any column that is open all the way to the floor. A landing spot in the right column is reached by sliding right along a row with no walls before the edge. Usually one or two steps of this backward reasoning connect to a cell that you can reach from the start.

Forward reading tends to fail because every slide from the start opens several branches. Backward reading starts from the two edges the solution must use, which is a much smaller set.

Wasted slides, not traps

Since October 2026 every board is checked so that no slide can trap you: from any square you can reach, the flag is still reachable. A wrong slide therefore never ends a board, but it does cost time, because there is no undo and the way back can take several moves. The New button is not a reset for one board either; it starts the whole 60-second run over at zero.

Two habits keep wasted slides down. First, an enclosed pocket is cheap to enter and expensive to leave, so before sliding into one, check which way you would come back out. Second, if you are unsure, take the move that keeps you closer to the bottom row or the right column, since those are where the finish lies.

Spending sixty seconds well

A good run is a steady rhythm of short decisions. Read the board, commit to a full sequence, and play it without stopping to check after every slide. Hesitation between moves costs more than an occasional extra move.

• Plan the whole route before the first swipe. Boards appear half a second after a clear, so use that moment to look at where the new walls are rather than at the score.
• Use short, firm swipes. The direction is decided by whichever axis moved more, so a diagonal smudge can send you the wrong way. Keep swipes clearly horizontal or vertical.
• Watch the clock colour. The time box changes style in the last fifteen seconds. If a board looks complicated at that point, it still pays to try it, because a board half-solved when time runs out simply scores nothing.

Your best count is saved on your device, and any run with at least one cleared board can be submitted to the timed Hall of Fame from the end card.