Skewb Solver

How to enter your Skewb

Hold the Skewb with one face toward you: that is Front, and the face pointing at the ceiling is Up. To see Right, Left or Back, turn the whole puzzle on the table so that face comes round to you, keeping Up on top; for Up tip it toward you, for Down tip it away. Paint each face as it looks from there: the diamond in the middle is the centre, the four triangles are the corners.

Each colour appears on five stickers, one centre and four corners, and the counter turns red until it does. Any colour scheme works: the corner at the top right of the front face never moves in a solution, so the solver reads the scheme from it. Keep holding the puzzle the way you painted it.

What the moves mean

The moves are the ones used in competition scrambles. Each turns half the puzzle, a third of a turn, around one corner, clockwise as you look straight at that corner. With Up on top and Front toward you: R turns around the corner at the bottom right at the back, U around the top left at the back, L around the bottom left at the front, and B around the bottom left at the back. A dash, R', turns the other way. The stickers that are about to move are outlined on the net, and Step walks through the solution one move at a time.

Why it is always the shortest solution

With one corner held still, a Skewb has 3,149,280 positions, and none is more than 11 moves from solved; by the page's own count only 90 need all eleven. The solver searches solutions in order of length, ruling out any branch that two exact tables, one for the centres and corner twists, one for the corner places and twists, show cannot finish in time. Neither table ever overestimates, so the first solution it finds is a shortest one.

Before it went up, the whole puzzle was mapped by brute force, all 3,149,280 positions, and for 300 of them chosen at random the solver's answer was exactly as short as the true distance.

When it says your Skewb cannot be right

A Skewb cannot twist a single corner in place or swap two centres by turning, so a painted net that needs either is reported rather than searched forever. If it happens, look for a corner whose three colours go round in the wrong order, or two stickers painted in each other's place. If the painting is right and it still will not solve, the puzzle has been taken apart and put back wrongly.

More twisty puzzles

The same shortest-solution solvers handle the 2x2 cube and the Pyraminx, and the cube timer makes competition-style Skewb scrambles for practice. We do not make twisty puzzles; if what you enjoy is a puzzle you can turn over in your hands, our mechanical puzzles are the other kind, with no algorithms at all. There are more solvers on the puzzle tools page.