Tilt Maze

Tilt the board and the marker slides that way until a wall or the board edge halts it. It cannot stop midway, so the question is never "which way is the exit" — it is "which wall will stop me where I need to be". Land exactly on the exit inside a tilt budget that is always achievable, because it is the shortest route the solver found plus three.

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 focused.
2. Tilt with the arrow keys, or W A S D. The marker slides until a wall or the edge stops it.
3. Or point at a square — a wall included — and the board tilts toward it. Clicking the wall you want to brake against is the quickest way to play with a mouse or a thumb. There is also a four-way pad under the board for touch.
4. Land exactly on the exit. Sliding across it does not count. Something has to stop you there.
5. Read the two numbers. Shortest route is the best this board allows from the start; from here is the best still available from where you now are, recalculated after every slide. If it went up, that tilt cost you.

A tilt that cannot move the marker costs nothing — after every slide you are flush against whatever stopped you, so pressing that direction again is free. Each wall block also counts the times you have braked against it, which is the fastest way to spot a route going in circles.

How do you solve a tilt maze where the piece slides until it hits a wall?

Stop thinking in directions and start thinking in stopping squares. Because you cannot halt midway, the only places you will ever stand are the squares directly beside a wall or against an edge — so the puzzle is not a path through open ground, it is a short chain of braking surfaces. Work it backwards: look at the exit, ask which wall or edge could stop you on it, and you have narrowed the last tilt to one or two directions. Ask the same question of the square that last tilt must start from, and keep going until you reach where you are standing. Four or five links usually does it, and it is far faster than tilting to see what happens — which also costs you a tilt every time. The one trap worth naming: a slide is not reversible. Tilting back gets you moving again, but it rarely returns you to the square you left.

Is every board actually solvable?

Yes, and by construction rather than by luck. Walls are placed first, then a breadth-first search runs from the start over slide moves, and the exit is chosen from the squares that search actually reached. An unreachable exit is never rejected because it is never proposed. The same search returns the shortest route in tilts, which is the number printed on the board, and the budget is that number plus three — so the target is always reachable and always tight.

Why did my round end before I ran out of tilts?

You slid into a pocket the exit cannot be reached from. Sliding is one-way in places: the tilt that gets you moving again can carry you past the square you came from and leave you circling a region with no way out. Rather than let you spend the rest of the budget somewhere you cannot win, the game says so at once. Losing that way twice is usually enough to start checking a slide's landing square before committing to it.

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

None, and there never will be. No currency, nothing to buy, no lives or hints for sale, no prizes, and no gambling of any kind anywhere in Demystify Play.

Do I need to see colour to play this?

No. Every square carries a shape as well as a tint: a hatched block is a wall, a ring is the exit, a solid diamond is the marker and a star is the marker sitting on the exit. Turn the screen greyscale and nothing is lost. A screen reader hears each square named in words, plus the tilt that square would cause.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — boards are generated in your browser from a seed, so there is no level server to be offline from.

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

Both. Arrow keys or W A S D tilt the board, and every square is a real button you can reach with Tab. The live region announces where the marker is, where the exit is, how many tilts remain and the shortest route still available.

Seven squares by seven, ten walls, and a route between six and eleven tilts — deals outside that band are redrawn rather than dealt. The budget is always the shortest route plus three, so one wrong turn is survivable and two are not. There is no undo: in a sliding maze an undo would remove the only thing that makes a tilt a decision.

Slide Fifteen is the other spatial puzzle here where a move you make cannot simply be taken back, and Peg Jump shares the discipline of planning the last move first.

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