Welcome to the Sliding Block Puzzle Page. Here, you'll have the opportunity to see and play some sliding block puzzles that otherwise may be difficult or impossible to find without having to build them yourself!

First and foremost, on behalf of all puzzles solvers, I'd like to thank the puzzle designers. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge Minoru Abe for being the inspiration for this entire site.

All modern puzzle designs are used with permission of the manufacturer or designer; all rights are reserved. Scans of Minoru Abe puzzles were taken from the collections of Nick Baxter, Jerry Slocum, Dick Hess, Edward Hordern, and Stan Isaacs.

Minimum move counts and puzzle designer names are given where known. I am particularly indebted to Edward Hordern for the information found in his authoritative book Sliding Piece Puzzles. All puzzles that appear in his book are indexed by serial number; more information about these puzzles, particularly historical information, can be found there. Robert Henderson has completed an extensive computer analysis for most of the puzzles on this site.  Move counts shown with a question mark (?) are not verified as minimal. Noel Dillabough recently found a 227-move solution to Climb Pro 24 using a cluster of 16 2.4Ghz P4 computers; this was not shown to be minimal. Other move counts are taken from miscellaneous published sources and from reported improvements (thank you Junk Kato, Bob Henderson, Joe Turner, Bas de Bakker, Jim Leonard, Justin Leck, Daniel Błażewicz, and Edward Hordern). Please contact with any updates.

Puzzles are automated by a Java applet. Browsers no longer support native Java applets, but there are browser extensions that will convert Java to Javascript automatically. CheerpJ has been tested here using the Google Chrome browser, and this confirmation is recommened to play the puzzles. The Microsoft Edge browser is also possible, but not yet tested.

The Java Console (visible using Chrome's Inspect feature) will show the applet's internal log which includes all of your moves. This will be useful if you want to keep track of your moves once a puzzle is solved.

Many thanks go to Hirofumi Fujiwara for sharing his original Java source code. Last but not least, a big thank you to John Rausch for hosting this site along with the rest of his "Puzzle World"!!