Quest to 100 - My Attempt to Beat SLIDE

I built Pairdle Slide, which means I know exactly where every tile is allowed to go, how the boards are generated, and what the solver considers a good number. None of that, it turns out, makes me good at it.

Here are my actual statistics, pulled up while writing this and reproduced without flattery: my best-ever solve is 99 moves. My average is 222.

Sit with that gap for a second, because I had to. I have broken 100 exactly once in my life, and my typical game takes more than twice that. Somewhere between those two numbers is a version of me that plans ahead instead of shoving tiles around like a man rearranging a garage in the dark. This series is about finding him.

The rules of the quest

If you haven't met it: Slide is our daily sliding word game — a 6×6 board of tiles, each carrying a pair of letters, with two open squares to slide through. You slide pairs together to spell four-letter words until the board is clear. It's a direct descendant of the fifteen-puzzle you grew up with, except the tiles spell things, and the two open squares mean the board can never trap you in an unsolvable state.

Your score is simply your move count. Not time, not tools — raw moves, and lower is better. Which makes the target easy to say out loud:

Break 100. Not once, as a fluke — my 99 already proved a fluke is possible. Regularly. And I'm going to do it in stages, each one taking away a crutch:

1. Stage one: everything goes. Reveals, reorgs, clues — the full toolbag. Break 100 consistently.
2. Stage two: no reorgs. If I box myself into a corner, I live in that corner.
3. Stage three: no reveals. Blind. Just me, thirty-six tiles, and the consequences of my choices.

I'll be honest about every run, including the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones, based on that average.

About those tools

Since I'm going to be leaning on them for all of stage one, full disclosure on what they do.

A REVEAL shows you the words hiding in the board — you spend one, and the word list for that puzzle is yours for the rest of the run. You start the game with 5 reveals free. When they're gone, you can watch a short ad to earn another, or pick up a pack in the store. In today's run I paid for one, and I regret nothing.

A REORG is the escape hatch. When your solved words have tiled themselves into walls and the leftover pairs can't reach each other any more, a reorg sweeps the finished words neatly to the top and re-scatters the loose tiles into open space. You start with 6. Neither reveals nor reorgs change your score — the move count is the move count — but needing them tells you something about how you played, which is why stages two and three exist.

There are CLUEs too (they flash the two halves of one word you haven't found yet), but clues are for when a board has genuinely beaten me, and I'd rather you heard about those days from someone else.

The part hidden under PUZZLES

Before the run: a confession about a feature some players never find.

On the PUZZLES screen, next to the themed galleries and the archive of past dailies, there's a tab called Beat the Bot. Behind it live five bots — Tumble, Sprocket, Vector, Cipher and HAL — each one waiting to race you on a board with a known solver benchmark. Tumble is friendly. HAL is not. You're not competing against other players there; you're chasing the machine's number on the exact board you're holding.

It is, and I say this as the person responsible for it, a much fairer judge of your sliding than the leaderboard. The bot solved the board. The bot has a number. Either you beat the number or you didn't. My relationship with the ladder is best described as aspirational, and every bracketed aside in the walkthrough below is the sort of thing my bot would say to me if I let it talk.

Today's board: Ice Cream

The August 8 daily was the Ice Cream board — and if you haven't played it yet, it's waiting in ARCHIVES, so consider this your spoiler warning.

Every daily hides four themed words among its seventeen, and today's were exactly the ones you'd want: COLD, CONE, MELT, MINT. Solve the board and the day's painting reveals itself through the tiles — today, a kid in white overalls holding a triple-scoop like a trophy while two pigeons work the cobblestones for drips.

Here's how it went.

Move 0: thirty-six strangers

This is what greets you: thirty-six tiles of two letters each, two open squares to slide through, and no idea which pairs belong together. Look at the toolbar and you'll notice my REVEAL counter already reads 3, not 5 — the two missing ones went to earlier boards in this quest, which tells you how stage one is going.

I stared at this for a while cold. NT, MI, LO... you can feel words in there — that IR in the top row wants to be the back half of something, and the two COs mean two words start with CO — but staring at raw pairs is exactly the slow, expensive way to play. Guessing wrong costs moves, and moves are the score.

(My BOT says a professional would notice MINT sitting in the top-left corner immediately: NT, MI — both halves, adjacent, in exactly the wrong order. Two tiles that close and you still have to walk one of them all the way around the block to swap them. This is how the board mocks you.)

Still move 0: I pay the man

So I paid for a reveal — counter drops to 2 — and the fog lifts: all seventeen words on the table before I'd made a single move. The four themed ones I might have guessed from the ice-cream painting alone (COLD, CONE, MELT, MINT), plus the thirteen from the general pool: WAVY, LOWS, RIFF, PAST, TILE, GOAL, VAIN, RIFE, PACT, LADS, FIST, HAIR, BITS.

This is what a reveal buys you: not moves, not a solution — just the shopping list. You still have to figure out which CO goes with which partner, and in what order to clear things so you don't wall yourself in. In stage one of the quest I take that deal every time. Knowing the words is the difference between sliding with intent and sliding to see what happens, and my average of 222 is a museum of sliding to see what happens.

Move 2: first blood, and it's CONE

Two moves. That's all CONE needed, and both of them are visible if you compare the boards: CO was already sitting on the second row with HA next to it and a gap one square over. Slide HA right into the gap, drop NE up into the space it left, and CO-NE snap together.

And here's my favorite thing in the whole game: the merged word doesn't leave the board — it becomes a window. Look at that tile now. The striped awning, the leaves, the stack of cones: the first little porthole onto the day's painting, with sixteen more panes to open. That kid with his triple-scoop is under there somewhere.

(My BOT says opening with CONE was correct — two moves, no disruption — and that "favorite thing in the whole game" is not a scoring category.)

Move 14: the backwards corner falls

The bot called it at move 0, so I went and dealt with it: MINT. Both halves in the top-left corner, touching — and dealt in exactly the wrong order, NT then MI. Here's the cruel arithmetic of a sliding puzzle: two adjacent tiles cannot simply trade places. You have to walk one of them out, around, and back in a little rotation, using open squares that were — check the last frame — a couple of rows away from where I needed them. Twelve moves to "swap" two tiles that were already holding hands. That's why my move counter reads 14 and my word counter reads 2.

The reward is the prettiest corner of the board so far: MINT's window of leaves and string lights sitting right on top of CONE's awning, the picture starting to assemble itself along the left edge.

Move 41: the run

Then the board opened up. Twenty-seven moves brought down four words — RIFF, PAST, TILE, GOAL — and look at the left side now: it's turning into the painting, top to bottom, like someone squeegeeing the fog off a window. TILE is my favorite pane of the run: it caught the kid's face, mid-grin, between the gelato tubs and the cone stack.

Notice the BONUS meter too — it reads 2. While shuffling pairs toward their targets I'd accidentally spelled two valid four-letter words that aren't on the list at all. Slide banks those as bonus words. I won't pretend they were on purpose.

(My BOT says twenty-seven moves for four words is nearly respectable, and that it has noted — for later — that the CO I will need for COLD is still sitting in the bottom row, doing nothing, with its LD on the far side of the board.)

Move 48: HAIR, containing no hair

FIST and HAIR inside seven more moves, and the game's little joke lands: the HAIR tile's window shows awning stripes and a tower of waffle cones — not a hair in sight. The kid's actual white mop lives in the TILE pane one row down. The portholes open wherever the word happens to merge, so the picture comes back to you shuffled, like a jigsaw assembling in the wrong order on purpose.

Eight words down, nine to go, 48 moves on the clock. On pace — for a personal best, anyway. And then the board stopped cooperating.

Move 65: the escape hatch

Compare this frame with the last one and two things jump out. First: the finished words are no longer scattered where they merged — they're packed into tidy rows at the top. Second: my REORG counter reads 5.

Yes. I pressed the button. Look at the move-48 board again and you can see why: my solved words had grown into a wall down the left side with HAIR and TILE jutting into the middle, and the leftover pairs were split into pockets that couldn't reach each other without ten-move detours around my own success. That's the trap of the porthole system — every solved word becomes scenery, and scenery blocks traffic. A reorg sweeps the finished words to the top and re-scatters the loose tiles into open space. It costs nothing on the scoreboard — the score is raw moves, always — but stage two of this quest is going to hurt.

With room to work again, LADS (a pigeon, working the cobblestones) and WAVY (the kid clutching his cone against the cart's stripes) both came down, and the bonus meter climbed to 5.

(My BOT says it has completed this board many times and has never once needed the furniture rearranged.)

Move 106: the grind

And here is where sub-100 died today. From move 65 to move 106 — forty-one moves — I found exactly four words: MELT, VAIN, RIFE, LOWS. Nothing about them is individually hard; it's that by this stage every merge is a delivery job across a board that's mostly picture. MELT's halves crossing behind the wheel, LOWS assembling in the cart's shadow, me nudging VAIN around three finished windows to reach the pavement with the tell-tale pink drips. One more accidental bonus word along the way — the meter ticked to 6.

If you're keeping score at home: the first ten words cost me 65 moves. These four cost 41. That stretch, right there, is the entire gap between me and the number 99.

(My BOT says the word for this phase of my game is "sightseeing.")

Move 107: PACT, in one

One move. PA and CT were already sitting adjacent-ready when the dust of the grind settled, and they snapped together like they'd been waiting for me to notice. Fifteen down. This is what the good version of this game feels like, and it lasted exactly one move.

Move 119: the CO that waited all game

Two words left, and both were long-distance relationships: BITS needed the BI from the bottom-left corner to reach a TS parked mid-board, and COLD — the very last word — finally paid off the other CO, the one that had been sitting in the bottom-left since move 0 while its twin got CONE all the glory. A hundred and seventeen moves that tile waited. Twelve moves closed them both, and at 119 the last two panes swung open.

And there it is: the full painting. The striped cart, the geraniums, the kid with his three-scoop trophy, the two pigeons closing in on the drips. Seventeen words, six accidental bonus words, one reveal, one reorg, zero clues — and every merge along the way had been quietly assembling this.

The verdict

119 moves.

Not the day the quest ends, then. But look at it next to that lifetime average: 222 is my normal, and this board came in more than a hundred moves under it. The reveal did exactly what stage one says it's allowed to do — I spent the whole run sliding toward words instead of wandering around discovering them, and the number shows it.

And now I know precisely where the missing twenty moves live, because the frames above testify to it: twelve moves burned un-backwards-ing MINT in the opening, and that forty-one-move sightseeing tour between moves 65 and 106. The gap between 119 and 99 isn't knowledge any more; it's routing — finishing each word in a way that leaves a lane open for the next one, instead of bricking myself in and paying a reorg to be let out.

Twenty moves to find. I know exactly where they're hiding, because I'm the one who hid them.

Where the quest stands

Best ever	99 moves
Lifetime average	222 moves
Stage	1 of 3 — all tools allowed
Reveals left	2
Reorgs left	5

Play along, and write to me

The whole point of doing this in public is that I don't get to quietly delete the bad days. If you're taking your own run at breaking 100 — with tools, without, or straight into HAL's smug little benchmark — I genuinely want to hear how it's going.

Email me at tim@logicloftgames.com with your best score, your average if you're brave, or the move that ruined your day. The best (and worst) reader runs may show up in a future instalment of the quest.

Next entry: another day, another board, and — statistically speaking — another number that starts with a 2.

---

By Tim Nye, founder of Logic Loft Games. Tim built Pairdle, Pairdle Slide, and the bot that is better at his own game than he is.