Skewb Solver

Painting centers and corner triangles, or pasting a WCA scramble

A Skewb has no edge pieces. Its eight corners show three triangles each and its six centers one tilted square each, so there are exactly 30 stickers to paint. The tool opens on a 3D Skewb that you drag round and tap; the Flat net tab lays the same 30 out like an unfolded cube. On each face, the square is the center and the four triangles around it belong to four different corners. Keys 1 to 6 pick the colors and Fill solved paints a finished Skewb, so you only change the stickers that differ. Any orientation is fine, but the colors must follow the standard scheme: white opposite yellow, red opposite orange and green opposite blue.

Typing a written scramble beats painting. Enter the moves under Or type a scramble, for example R L' U B' R', and press Apply scramble. The field reads WCA Skewb notation, R, L, U and B with an optional apostrophe plus the rotations x, y and z, and ignores brackets and commas, so a line copied from a competition scramble sheet works unchanged.

Why the Skewb cube solver calls a position impossible

The solver checks your stickers before it searches and outlines the ones to look at:

• Wrong color count Each color appears exactly five times, on one center and four corner triangles.
• A corner that cannot exist White never shares a corner with yellow, and neither do red and orange or green and blue.
• The same corner twice One of the two corners was painted wrong.
• A twisted corner Every color fits, but a corner sits rotated in place, as after a corner pops out and goes back the wrong way.
• Two pieces swapped Centers and corners each keep a parity that no turn can change.

A few twist combinations slip past these checks, so every solution is also replayed on the site’s own model of the puzzle before you see it. If the replay does not end solved, you get “This position cannot be reached by turning” instead of a wrong answer.

How the Skewb solver finds a short solution

The Skewb has 3,149,280 positions. The solver first finds the corner with white, red and green, then turns the entered puzzle so that corner sits at the top-front-right with white facing up: the one corner that R, L, U and B never move. After that, the Skewb search from the open-source cubing.js library takes over, right in your browser.

The search is built to answer quickly, not to prove that no shorter solution exists. Answers use only R, L, U and B; the x, y and z rotations that the scramble field accepts never show up in a solution, because turning the puzzle onto its anchor corner has already done that job, and the hold note tells you the grip instead.

Skewb notation: R, L, U and B turn around corners

Each letter swings half the puzzle, four corners and three centers, a third of a turn around one corner: R around the corner at the bottom right at the back, L at the bottom left at the front, U at the top left at the back, and B at the bottom left at the back. Turn clockwise as you face that corner; an apostrophe reverses the direction.

Four letters are enough, because turning the opposite corner of any pair moves the same pieces relative to each other; it only changes which half stays still.

Anchor corner first: following the solution on your Skewb

The note above the replay says to hold the Skewb with white on top and green in front. On a scrambled puzzle the white center could be anywhere, so go by the anchor corner instead: white, green and red at the top-front-right, with white up and green toward you. No move in the solution touches that corner, so if it ever moves, a turn went wrong.

The 3D replay has Play, Next move and a Speed setting from 0.5× to 4×, and a click on any tile in the move strip jumps there. Copy share link copies a link to this exact puzzle, and Play with this puzzle opens it in the Skewb online simulator to rehearse the moves first.

How to solve a Skewb yourself, in three stages

The usual beginner method has three stages:

1. First layer. Solve one center with the four corners around it, so that neighboring corners match on the sides. This part is mostly intuitive.
2. The opposite corners. Place and turn the four corners of the other layer with one short sequence, repeated from different angles.
3. The centers. With every corner done, cycle the remaining centers onto their faces with another short sequence.

The solver does not work in stages; it treats the whole puzzle at once. It still makes a good checker: paint your Skewb after the first layer and see how few moves the rest really needs. The Pyraminx solver covers the other corner-turning puzzle on this site.