How to play Slideout
Slideout is a daily sliding-block puzzle. A tray of blocks, one of them marked, and a gap in the wall on the right: slide the others out of the way and work the marked block to the gap. Blocks only ever travel along their own line — the flat ones left and right, the upright ones up and down — nothing rotates, and only the marked block may leave. What makes it different from every other game on 4Games is the par. Each tray has been solved exactly before it was published, so the fewest moves it can possibly be done in is known and printed on the board, and finishing is only half the result: the other half is how close to that number you came. It needs no reading at all — there are no words and no numbers in the puzzle itself.
Or play Slideout Arcade, a real-time run played for a personal best.
How to play
- Find the marked block and the gap in the right-hand wall. They are always on the same row.
- Pick a block, then move it. Tap it and use the arrow buttons, or Tab to it and press an arrow key.
- Each cell a block travels is one move, even when a single tap sends it several cells.
- Work out which blocks are actually in the way, and what has to move before those can.
- Compare your count with the par shown above the board. Matching par is the best a tray can be done in.
- The round ends by itself when the marked block is out. Show solution steps through the best line but ends the day unsolved.
Tips & strategy
- Start at the exit and work backwards. Ask what is blocking your block, then what is blocking that, rather than shuffling from the far side of the tray.
- Look for the block with the most room first. A long slide that opens a lane is usually worth more than three small ones that tidy the board.
- Empty cells are the real resource. Count them before you move, because a block can only go where a gap already is.
- Beware of moves that undo each other. If a block ends up where it started, those cells were spent for nothing — and par is unforgiving about it.
- The upright blocks in your own row are the ones that matter most. Each has to clear your row entirely, so check whether it has the space above or below to do that at all.
- If you are stuck, open "The board in words". Reading what is in the way, in order, often shows the dependency the picture hides.
- Start over costs you nothing but the moves you already spent, and a clean second run is usually shorter than rescuing a tangled first one.
Accessibility
Slideout is playable without seeing it. Every block is a button whose name is a full sentence — its shape, its size, the rows or columns it occupies, and how far it can currently move in each direction — carried as real text rather than a label that some roles silently drop. Tab moves between blocks and the arrow keys move the block you are on, so there is no drag anywhere and no mode to be in; the on-screen arrows do the same job for touch, at 44 pixels or more. "The board in words" states what stands between your block and the exit, and then walks the tray row by row, naming empty runs rather than leaving them unmentioned. No colour carries meaning: the marked block is marked by a star, by a heavier border and by the words "your block" in its name, and the rest carry letters.