6E Cube Game

The 3x3 cube has six faces of nine stickers each, 26 moving pieces and 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions. Only one of them is solved. Turning any face moves nine stickers at once, which is why a few random twists are enough to make the puzzle look hopeless and why learning a method beats guessing.

6E Cube Game gives you three ways in. The cube solver is for the cube on your desk: copy its colours into the app and follow the moves on the screen while you turn the real thing. The timer tab is for practice, with proper scrambles and the averages speedcubers use. The trainer and the beginner method guide are for learning to solve it yourself, step by step, with the moves shown on a cube rather than in a diagram.

How the solver finds a route

Every position can be solved in 20 moves or fewer, a result known as God’s number. The solver here uses the two-phase method: it first brings the cube into a smaller group of positions that need only a handful of move types, then finishes inside that group. Both phases are searched with precomputed tables, so a solution of around 20 to 22 moves arrives in well under a second once the tables are built. The tables are built in your browser the first time you open the solver tab, which takes a few seconds.

Before it searches, the solver checks that your colours describe a cube that can exist: nine stickers of each colour, every corner and edge a real piece, and no single twisted corner, flipped edge or swapped pair. Those three impossible cases are the usual sign of a mis-entered sticker, and the app highlights the pieces to look at.

Reading the moves

Moves are written in standard notation: U, D, R, L, F and B for the up, down, right, left, front and back faces, a plain letter for a clockwise quarter turn as you look at that face, an apostrophe for anticlockwise and a 2 for a half turn. The notation page goes through all of it, including slices, wide moves and rotations, and the Learn tab lets you tap each one and watch.

Timing like a speedcuber

The timer waits until your first turn after a scramble and stops the instant the cube is solved; the clock runs on the logical cube, not the animation, so fast fingers are never held back. It keeps your best single, the mean of all solves and the two averages used in competition, Ao5 and Ao12, which drop the best and worst time before averaging. The timer page explains how to read them and how to use the tips to bring them down.

Four cubes and a leaderboard

Pick 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 in the Play tab; each gets its own scrambles, its own local records and its own public board. Register a player name and every timed solve is posted automatically. The server replays the scramble and your moves before it accepts a time, which is what keeps the leaderboard honest. The 3x3 solver and the guides are the same with or without an account.