Dice Path

A die sits on a five-by-five grid. Every move tips it over one edge onto the next square, and the face on top changes because of it — the face you tip towards goes underneath, and whatever was underneath comes up. The target square is dashed, and the digit on it is the face it wants. Getting there is easy; getting there with the right number on top is the puzzle, and it is why a square one step away can still be five rolls off.

Nothing about the rolling is chance. A die that is tipped is not a die that is thrown: the same roll from the same position always turns up the same face, every time, on every device. The only thing the seed decides is which puzzle you get — and it hands the same one to everybody who plays that seed.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is outlined.
2. Roll with the arrow keys, or W A S D. One press tips the die one square. There is no undo and no way to slide two squares at once.
3. Or press a square beside the die. Only those four do anything, and each one shows the digit that would end up on top if you rolled there — the lookahead a real die cannot give you.
4. Read the dashed square. That is the target, and the digit on it is the face it needs. The status row repeats it as Needs.
5. Watch Best case. It is the fewest rolls that can still finish, counted from exactly where you are. A good roll drops it by one; a wrong one puts it up by one.
6. Roll into the edge as much as you like. It is not a move, so it costs nothing.
7. Finish inside the budget. The budget is the shortest possible route plus four, which is exactly two wrong rolls — each one costs two, itself and the roll that puts it back. The round ends as soon as the target is out of range, rather than making you spend the rest of the budget finding that out.

How does the top face of a die change when you roll it one square?

Opposite faces of a die always add to seven, and that single fact decides everything. Tip the die one square and three things happen at once: the face that was on top swings down to the side you rolled towards, the face that was on that side goes underneath, and the face that was underneath — seven minus the one you rolled towards — comes up. The two faces on the axis you turned about do not move at all. Start with 1 on top, 2 pointing up the screen and 3 to the right, and you can check all four: roll up and the 5 comes up, because the 5 was hiding under the 2. Roll down and the 2 comes up. Roll left and the 3 comes up. Roll right and the 4 comes up, because 4 is seven minus the 3 on the right-hand face. None of that is a throw and none of it varies — it is geometry, so the same roll always gives the same face, which is what makes this a puzzle you can plan rather than a thing that happens to you.

Why is the target sometimes one square away and still five rolls off?

Because where the die is standing is not the whole state. What matters is the square and which face is where: twenty-five squares times the twenty-four ways a cube can sit is six hundred positions, and every roll changes both halves at once. Half of those six hundred you can never reach, because a roll always flips the square's colour and turns the die together — they are welded to each other from the first move. What is left is twelve ways to sit on any one square, so exactly two of them show the face you have been asked for, and walking straight to the square almost never lands on either. The fix is the four-roll lap: roll down, right, up, left and the die is back on the square it started from with a different face on top. Four rolls that look wasted are how you turn the die, and learning to spend them on purpose — early, while the budget is fresh — is the whole skill of the game.

What is the roll budget, and why that number?

It is the shortest route that exists, plus four. A breadth-first search runs over every reachable state — square plus orientation — before you see the board, so the budget is measured from the real answer rather than guessed at by a designer. The plus-four is exactly two mistakes: because rolling back the way you came undoes the roll perfectly, a roll in the wrong direction costs two rolls, not one. That also means an odd margin would buy nothing that the even one below it does not, which is why it is four and not three or five. The same search prints Best case live, so a wasted roll is visible the moment you make it instead of four rolls later when the budget runs dry.

Can I be given a target that cannot be reached?

No, and not because it was checked afterwards — because of how it was built. To make a board, the game rolls the die along a seeded path from your starting square and then picks one of the places that path actually passed through. So the target is somewhere the die has demonstrably been from exactly this start, and the walk that got there is a complete solution, roll for roll. The search is what rates it: it reports the true shortest route, throws out anything solvable in fewer than five rolls as too easy, and sets the budget. An impossible board is not filtered out here, it is unbuildable.

Is there any money, betting or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. There is no currency, nothing to buy, no lives to refill and nothing to win or lose but the puzzle itself. The score is derived from the finished board — how deep the deal was and how many rolls you had left — and it stays on your device.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded, the board, the rules and the search all live on your device, and nothing is sent anywhere while you play. It is the same code with the network on or off, which is easy to believe here because there is nothing a server could usefully add: the puzzle comes out of the seed, and so does the answer.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both. Arrows or W A S D roll the die and nothing else is needed, so there is no pointer-only move. Every square announces itself in words — "the die, 4 on top", "target, needs 6 on top", "roll left to land 3 on top" — and the running commentary gives the count of rolls left and the fewest that can still finish. Nothing depends on telling colours apart: the die sits in a solid-bordered square, the target is dashed, the squares you can roll into are dotted, and each carries its own word or arrow.

One die, one target, a five-by-five board with no walls and no second piece. No undo, no timer and no hints beyond the ones printed on the board. The deepest puzzle this board can hold is eight rolls — measured across every start and target combination, not estimated — so a perfect run is five to eight rolls inside a budget of nine to twelve, and a round is a couple of minutes rather than an evening. Deals shallower than five rolls are never handed out, which does mean the difficulty range is narrow by design.

Tilt Maze is the other puzzle here where a solver sets the budget and the shortest route is rarely the obvious one — but there the piece slides until something stops it, so the difficulty is in choosing what to brake against. Knight Hop is the other board game where a move cannot be taken back, and where the thing that beats you is a dead end you could have seen coming.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.