These sorts of puzzles have several possible solutions, as may be seen from examples such as Ro-Let (a letter-based fifteen puzzle), Scribe-o (4x8), and Lingo. Chapman's invention initiated a puzzle craze in the early 1880s.įrom the 1950s through the 1980s sliding puzzles employing letters to form words were very popular. The oldest type of sliding puzzle is the fifteen puzzle, invented by Noyes Chapman in 1880 Sam Loyd is often wrongly credited with making sliding puzzles popular based on his false claim that he invented the fifteen puzzle. Hence, finding moves and the paths opened up by each move within the two-dimensional confines of the board are important parts of solving sliding block puzzles. This property separates sliding puzzles from rearrangement puzzles. Unlike tour puzzles, a sliding block puzzle prohibits lifting any piece off the board. However, the mechanical fixtures are usually not essential to these puzzles the parts could as well be tokens on a flat board that are moved according to certain rules. As the illustration shows, some sliding puzzles are mechanical puzzles.

In at least one vintage case of the popular Chinese cognate game Huarong Road, a wire screen prevents lifting of the pieces, which remain loose. In manufactured wood and plastic products, the linking and encaging is often achieved in combination, through mortise-and-tenon key channels along the edges of the pieces. Sliding puzzles are essentially two-dimensional in nature, even if the sliding is facilitated by mechanically interlinked pieces (like partially encaged marbles) or three-dimensional tokens. The pieces to be moved may consist of simple shapes, or they may be imprinted with colours, patterns, sections of a larger picture (like a jigsaw puzzle), numbers, or letters.

A sliding puzzle, sliding block puzzle, or sliding tile puzzle is a combination puzzle that challenges a player to slide (frequently flat) pieces along certain routes (usually on a board) to establish a certain end-configuration.

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