Slide Par

About Slide Par

Slide Par is a sliding tile puzzle that tells you something the genre never does: the exact fewest moves the board in front of you can be finished in.

That number is not an estimate. Before a board is ever handed to you, the game solves it and finds the true minimum. If it cannot finish solving a board, that board is thrown away and replaced. So when it says par 23, 23 is real, and finishing in 23 means nothing was wasted.

WHAT YOU GET
- 3x3, 4x4 and 5x5 boards, numbered so you can come back to one
- The exact minimum shown on 3x3 and 4x4
- Your best result kept per board, so a second attempt has a target
- Tap a tile far from the gap and the whole row or column slides at once
- Every move saved, per board size, so leaving mid-puzzle costs nothing

HONEST ABOUT HOW IT WORKS
A truly random 15-puzzle can need up to 80 moves, which is far beyond what a phone can prove. So boards are built within the range where the minimum can be verified. They are easier than a fully random shuffle, and the game says so on a screen you can open any time by tapping par. On 5x5 no minimum is shown at all, because none can be computed on a phone, and the game does not guess.

Every board is solvable. Which arrangements can be finished is decided by a rule about the tiles rather than by trial, so an impossible board is never built in the first place.

Everything runs on your phone. No account, no sign-up, no server, and it works with no signal at all. Nothing to unlock and no purchases of any kind.