At last, a playable version of 15 Puzzle! This is a Scratch version of the well-known sliding tile puzzle, designed to amuse and test your skill and intelligence. It looks simple, but to solve a test in a minimum number of moves, you must study the board configuration and devise a good tactic to put tiles in the order 1 to 15. A tile can be moved in 4 directions (up, down, left, right) towards the empty square. To move a tile, just click it. Dragging the slide control "difficulty" you choose the level of difficulty of the puzzles. The monitor "moves" accumulates the number of moves you made while solving a puzzle. To generate a new puzzle just click the "shuffle" button; the tiles will be scrambled, and you can begin solving the new puzzle. Enjoy!
The game 15 Puzzle was invented in 1878 by Matthias J. Rice in Boston, and it was initially called “The Gem Puzzle”. All the known computer versions of this game over-scramble the tiles, generating tile arrangements that require many moves to be solved. Then the player goes on wild and blindly solving, by frenetically moving the tiles with very little or no planning at all. Research done on this game revealed that by controlling the number of moves during the puzzle generation process the solving procedure could be made more enjoyable and challenging to the player. The program generates easy, medium and hard puzzles by dragging the slider control “difficulty”. Beginners should start solving easy tests (difficulty 8 to 13), then proceed to the medium (14 to 19) and hard (20 to 25) levels, as they gain experience.
