Ice Maze Puzzles
Choose a direction and slide until something stops you. Steering is the puzzle: you never pick where to stop, only which way to set off.
Hints available. Play as many boards as you like.
Ready when you are.
Scan to open on a phone
Scan for the same board — no hints.
How to play
Swipe in any direction and the marker slides until a block or the edge of the board stops it. There is no stepping one square at a time.
Reach the star. Sliding over it does not count — you have to stop on it, which is what makes an apparently direct route so often wrong.
Blocks are the only thing you can steer with. A board with no blocks near the star cannot be finished, so every block you can reach is a tool rather than an obstacle.
Strategy
Work backwards from the star. Ask which squares can stop on it — that means a block or an edge immediately beyond it — and the puzzle becomes a much smaller question about how to reach one of those.
Read the walls as brakes, not barriers. In an ordinary maze a block is something to go around; here it is the only reason you can stop anywhere, and the useful ones are the blocks just past where you want to be.
Watch for long empty lanes. A row with nothing in it sends you all the way to the far edge, which is occasionally exactly what you want and more often the move that undoes your progress.
Count before you commit. Every board states the shortest number of slides it can be finished in, so if your route is running long there is a shorter one you have not seen.
Difficulty and variants
Easy boards are solvable in about five slides, medium in eight or nine, hard in twelve or more. The board grows a little with each level, but the move count is the difficulty — a large board with a short answer is an easy board.
Questions, answered
Why did I slide straight past the star?
Stopping requires something in the way. Passing over the star does nothing at all; you need a block or the board's edge immediately beyond it to bring you to rest on it.
Can I get stuck?
You can slide into a corner that no longer reaches the star, and the counter will tell you so. Nothing is lost — Clear puts the marker back at the start with the same board.
Is every board solvable?
Yes. The generator searches the slide routes before it accepts a board and records the true shortest one, so the number of moves shown is a fact rather than an estimate.
How is this different from the maze?
A maze asks which way to turn at each junction. An ice maze takes that choice away — you only decide the direction, and the board decides how far. They are opposite problems wearing similar clothes.