Daily Brains · slide and twist today's pixel picture back together on a wrap-around tray.
Zubix is the twisty-tile puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Each day a little pixel picture or colour pattern is frozen into a square tray of glossy tiles, then scrambled by a fixed number of moves. Slide rows and columns (and, later in the week, twist 2×2 blocks) until the tray matches the target in the corner. Everyone in the world gets the same tray on the same local day, and a built-in solver sets par.
STORY & LORE
A week of trays
The difficulty climbs through the week. Monday (Gentle) and Tuesday (Easy) are 3×3 trays with slides only; Wednesday (Steady) is 4×4 with slides; Thursday (Tricky) and Friday (Tough) add the clockwise twist on 4×4; Saturday (Devious) and Sunday (Fiendish) are 5×5 with slides and twists. The scramble length rises from 4 moves on Monday to 14 on Sunday.
Where the pictures come from
There are 45 pictures for 3×3 trays, 63 for 4×4 and 76 for 5×5: hand-drawn pixel pictures (a heart, a penguin, a lighthouse, a toadstool …) plus colour patterns built from gradients, rings, swirls, corners and staircases. Each size walks a shuffled copy of its book; every new pass turns the colour wheel a step (and later mirrors the picture), and the schedule refuses any board that already ran in the past 250 trays of that size. The test proves no tray repeats in the 365 days from puzzle #25.
How par is set
The day's seed picks a random route of player moves (with no obvious waste: no slide straight back, no loops) and the start board is the target with that route undone, so a solution of that length always exists. A bidirectional breadth-first solver then looks for anything shorter. Monday to Thursday it always finishes, so par is exact and proven optimal. Friday to Sunday the search is too big to finish in the browser, so the tray shows "par ≤ N" (the scramble length); the generator still throws away scrambles where it finds a short cut.
HOW IT PLAYS
Moves
Swipe a row left or right, or a column up or down, to slide it one step; it wraps around, so the tile that leaves one edge reappears on the other. The arrows around the tray do the same. From Thursday, ↻ knobs sit where four tiles meet: tap one to turn those four a quarter-turn clockwise. There is no anticlockwise twist (three twists make one). On a keyboard, arrows pick a tile, Shift+arrows or W A S D slide its row or column, Space twists the block under it, Z undoes and R resets.
Scoring
A solved tray scores up to 1000: 500 for solving, up to 400 for moves against par (400 × par ÷ moves, capped), and up to 100 for speed, fading to nothing over N minutes on an N×N tray. Undo and Reset are free; the move count is the number of moves still on the board. The clock starts on the first move and pauses while the tab is hidden.
Perfect days, giving up and sharing
Solving in par moves or fewer is a perfect day (⭐, and 🤯 if you beat a "par ≤ N"). Give up (tap twice) replays a par-length route from the scramble, scores 0 and resets the streak. The share card is the target picture itself in coloured squares, with your moves, par and time.
THE WEEK
| Day | Mood | Tray | Moves | Scramble | Par |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Gentle | 3×3 | slides | 4 | exact |
| Tuesday | Easy | 3×3 | slides | 6 | exact |
| Wednesday | Steady | 4×4 | slides | 7 | exact |
| Thursday | Tricky | 4×4 | slides + twists | 7 | exact |
| Friday | Tough | 4×4 | slides + twists | 10 | ≤ 10 (exact when the solver finishes) |
| Saturday | Devious | 5×5 | slides + twists | 11 | ≤ 11 |
| Sunday | Fiendish | 5×5 | slides + twists | 14 | ≤ 14 |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Solve the day's tray | 15 Tickets |
| Solve in par or fewer (perfect) | +25 Tickets |
| First Freeze (first solve) | 🧊 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| On the Nose (solve at par) | ⭐ Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Cold Snap (3-day streak) | ❄️ Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Deep Freeze (7-day streak) | 🥶 Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Permafrost (30-day streak) | 🏔️ Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version in Daily Brains.
- Wrap-around row/column slides with live swipe dragging, arrow buttons and keyboard; clockwise 2×2 twists from Thursday.
- Weekday ramp from a Gentle 3×3 Monday to a Fiendish 5×5 Sunday; solver-proven par Monday–Thursday, par ≤ N at the weekend.
- 184 pictures and patterns, recoloured each pass; no repeated tray for at least 365 days.
- Streaks, statistics, undo/reset, give-up replay and a share card that shows the picture.