Numbered tiles sit in a grid, and every row and every column has a target sum it's trying to hit. You slide the tiles around — like a sliding puzzle — to arrange them so that every row and every column adds up to its target at the same time. You win the moment all the headers turn green together. And because your score is based on how few moves you used, it's not enough to solve it; you want to solve it cleanly.
The difficulty grows the grid and the targets. A fresh daily puzzle each midnight, shareable with a friend through the challenge link.
Every slide moves one tile but changes two totals — its row and its column — so the puzzle is really about side effects, and the last few moves are pure bookkeeping. Seven levels from Beginner to Cyborg grow the grid and tighten the targets. The daily board is identical for everyone. Kakuro works the same row-and-column-sum muscle, minus the sliding.
My first ever Math Slide puzzle took me more than 150 moves. I counted, because by the end counting was all I had left — sliding tiles back and forth, fixing a row, breaking a column, fixing the column, breaking the row again. Somewhere past move one hundred I realised I wasn't solving the puzzle so much as negotiating with it. And then it clicked, the way these things do, and I was hooked for good. I solve them a lot faster now, but I built this game partly as a monument to that first ridiculous session.
What I learned from those 150 moves shaped the interface directly. The defining property of Math Slide is that no move is private: every slide changes a row total and a column total at the same time. You cannot touch one axis without disturbing the other. Early testers — and early me — kept losing track of that double side-effect, so the build shows live per-line deltas: beside every row and beneath every column, you can see exactly how far its current total sits from its goal, updating with every slide you make. The numbers don't solve anything for you. They just make the consequences of each move visible the instant it lands, which turns an invisible bookkeeping problem into something your eyes can track without effort.
The mistake that eats players is the endgame spiral — and it's exactly where my first-game move count went to die. You're two tiles from done. They won't resolve. So you slide the same stubborn line back and forth, again and again, expecting a different result each time. Here's the thing those deltas eventually taught me: when the last two tiles won't settle, the fix is almost never in the line you're staring at. It's a move in the other axis. Each tile is constrained by its row target and its column target simultaneously, so a deadlock in one dimension is usually a message that the other dimension is holding the wrong shape. Step sideways, and the jam dissolves like it was never there.
My advice for your first few boards: before sliding anything, read the deltas and find the line that's furthest from its goal — that's usually where the real work lives, and early moves there cost the least collateral damage. Keep your eye on both numbers a slide will touch, not just the one you happen to care about. And when you feel the urge to shuttle one line back and forth for the fifth consecutive time, stop. Look perpendicular instead.
The daily board resets at midnight, identical for everyone. If it takes you 150 moves the first time, you're in excellent company. It gets so much better from there.
The trap is fixing one row, feeling good, then wrecking it while you fix the next — because every slide moves tiles in two directions at once. So I don't chase rows one at a time. I look for the tile that's wrong in both its row and its column and move that one, so a single slide fixes two problems instead of trading one for another.
And since the score rewards fewer moves, I solve in my head before I touch a tile. Where does each number need to end up for every target to hit? Once you can see the finished arrangement, the slides are just the route to get there — and planning the route avoids the wasted back-and-forth that tanks your move count. Think first, slide second.
Math Slide makes you hold two things at once — the arithmetic of the targets and the spatial puzzle of the slides — and satisfy both together. That dual-track thinking is the whole challenge. There's a quiet truth in Math Slide that I keep coming back to: life is a puzzle where almost everything fits — but one piece out of place can make the whole thing look unsolvable. And then one right move, one small change, and suddenly it all lines up. The game teaches you not to panic at the version that looks broken, because the fix is usually a single slide away. You just have to find the one tile that's in the wrong place.
You're training mental arithmetic and spatial planning in the same motion, and the move-count scoring teaches you to plan before you act instead of fiddling your way to a solution. The bigger grids make both harder to juggle. No download, no sign-up — play in your browser on any device. If you like number puzzles, try Color Sort next.