Play Pyraminx Online

Four faces and fourteen pieces: the Pyraminx up close

A Pyraminx has no top face to look down on. It is a pyramid of four triangles, and the 3D view starts the way the solver asks you to hold the real puzzle: resting on its yellow face, with the green face toward you and one corner pointing up. From there the bottom face and the back corner are hidden, so you will turn the view often by dragging the empty space around the puzzle or using two fingers.

Each face is cut into nine small triangles, 36 stickers in all, and they belong to three kinds of piece. The triangles at the three points of a face are tips, which can twist on their own. The three pointing downward next to them belong to the center pieces, one three-colored piece under each tip. The three along the middle of the sides belong to the six two-colored edges. A corner turn carries a tip, its center piece and three edges, twelve stickers spread over three faces, while a tip twist moves only three.

Turning the virtual Pyraminx: click, drag, keys and buttons

The quickest way to turn it is a click. A click on a sticker turns the layer closest to it, clockwise as seen from the corner it belongs to, and a right-click turns it counter-clockwise. Click one of the small triangles at a point and only that tip twists; click anywhere else and the whole corner nearest to the sticker turns.

Dragging gives you more control, and it is the natural way to play on a phone: press a sticker and move it the way it should travel, and the layer that best follows your finger turns by a third. On a keyboard, U, L, R and B turn the top, left, right and back corners, Shift reverses them and Backspace undoes. The sixteen buttons under the puzzle cover every turn, corners and tips alike. Each letter always names the same corner, however you spin the view.

Tips, the four free moves of a Pyraminx

Each tip can face three ways, yet the tips add no difficulty. A tip only ever turns about its own corner, so twisting one never disturbs another piece, and a corner turn carries its tip and center piece round together, so a tip that matches its center stays matched. Every tip is therefore worth one move at most, whenever you choose to make it.

Here the tips are the lowercase buttons, u, l, r and b, or a click on one of the small triangles at a point. A twist counts as one move, the same as a corner turn, and the history writes it in lowercase, so you can see at a glance how many of your moves went to tips. A scramble mixes them too, and the puzzle only counts as solved once all four point the right way.

WCA random-state scrambles in the Pyraminx simulator

Scramble does what an official scrambler does: it picks a random position, with every reachable Pyraminx position equally likely, and mixes the tips as well. The scramble comes from the cubing.js library, the same open-source code behind the solver’s search, and is computed on your device; the button stays disabled for the moment that takes. The puzzle then jumps straight to the result, and the moves are not written out.

Random-state matters on a puzzle this small. A handful of random turns can leave a Pyraminx half solved, which makes practice too easy, while a random-state scramble gives you the same spread of positions a competitor meets. For a particular setup instead, a link to this page ending in ?alg= plus moves, such as ?alg=U L' R B', opens the puzzle already scrambled by that sequence.

Practice sessions on the virtual Pyraminx

With no timer on this page, the move counter is the score. Moves goes up by one for each corner or tip turn, Undo takes one away together with the last chip in the history, and a solved puzzle reports a line such as “Solved in 14 moves!”. Try three kinds of session:

• Count your tips and centers They need eight moves at most between them, so a higher count shows a wasted turn.
• Face by eye Build one face with its three edges without looking anything up, using Undo to test ideas.
• Beat your own number Scramble ten times and note the counts; they fall quickly once the last three edges come from memory.

The sequences for the last edges are on the Pyraminx solver page.

From the virtual Pyraminx to the solver and back

Solve this state opens the solver with the position on screen already painted onto its net. Press Solve there and you get a short solution, the grip to hold it in, which matches this simulator’s starting view, and a 3D replay you can step through. Play with this puzzle, under that solution, sends the same position back here so you can make the moves yourself.

To keep a position for later, send it to the solver and use Copy share link there. When the Pyraminx feels easy, the Skewb is a good next step: it also turns around its corners, but it is shaped like a cube. You can play the Skewb online with the same controls.