Sliding puzzle

A sliding puzzle, sliding block puzzle, or sliding tile puzzle is a tour puzzle that challenges a player to slide (frequently flat) pieces along certain routes (usually on a board) to establish a certain end-configuration. The pieces to be moved may consist of simple shapes, or they may be imprinted with colors, patterns, sections of a larger picture (like a jigsaw puzzle), numbers, or letters.

Sliding puzzles are essentially two-dimensional in nature, even if the sliding is facilitated by mechanically interlinked pieces (like partially encaged marbles) or three-dimensional tokens. As this example shows, some sliding puzzles are mechanical puzzles. However, the mechanical fixtures are usually not essential to these puzzles; the parts could as well be tokens on a flat board that are moved according to certain rules.

Unlike other tour puzzles, a sliding block puzzle prohibits lifting any piece off the board. This property separates sliding puzzles from rearrangement puzzles. Hence, finding moves and the paths opened up by each move within the two-dimensional confines of the board are important parts of solving sliding block puzzles.