Sequential Movement

These are all mechanical puzzles,

where you can get to a certain goal through a sequence of movements.

Moreover following conditions have to be fulfilled:

1.) At each move, it has to be possible to recognize all possible movements for the next move.

Thus, puzzles, where the possible movements for the next move have to be explored

are no sequential movement puzzles.

2.) The difficulty should be to find a sequence of movements to reach the goal.

Here are two examples where either the first or the second point is lacking.

Therefore these are not sequential movement puzzles.

To solve Disentanglement Puzzles you also need a sequence of movements.

But the possible movements for the next move are not obvious and have to be explored each time.

The difficulty of snake cubes is to find out how the pieces can be assembled to a cube.

It is not crucial to find a sequence of movements which turns the puzzle into a cube.

Sliding Puzzles

Sliding puzzles are composed of several tiles which lay in a defined geometric shape

and which are only moved by sliding. The objective is to rearrange the tiles

or to move one or several tiles to a specific position. Normally you only slide one tile at a moment.

Most sliding puzzles are plain, but this is not a necessity.

The geometric shape itself as well as the geometric shape and its tiles can be three-dimensional.

The geometric shape of the puzzle can be for example cylindric, spheric or cubic.

TwistyPuzzles

Twisty puzzles consist of several movable parts which lie in a frame

or are connected with each other through a core.

There are only few moves, where only one piece is slided.

Usually several pieces are slided or rotated with one movement.

The aim is to achieve a certain shape or a certain colour order.

Contrary to other sequential puzzles,

there is no definitiv movement order to attain the goal.

As also the number of combinations is very high,

algorithms are used to describe how to get to the goal.

The most popular example for twisty puzzles is the Rubic´s Cube.

There are two big groups of twisty puzzles:

2D TwistyPuzzles

The pieces lie in a flat frame.

3D TwistyPuzzles

As the name already indicates, these are 3 dimensional twisty puzzles.

They are very different from 2D twisty puzzles.

They don´t have a frame, but a core which is invisible.

The shape is almost always a mathematical object, consisting of several layers.

A movement is usually a rotation of several pieces around the axis of the mathematical object.

Mazes

A maze puzzle consists of very few parts. Generally, only two parts are given.

Thereby a traveller (represented by one piece) moves in an interconnected weaving path

(mostly represented by another piece). Some maze puzzles have additional constraints or possess more rules.

Other sequential movement puzzles

All other sequential puzzles, which don´t fit into any of the other categories

History