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Above you find a 14-block variant of a ten-by-ten
'three-square cover-uncover sliding puzzle'.
(Note that by using a link on this page outside the game board and its
buttons you will leave the puzzle and go to a different page.)
This second and (more) complicated variant can be solved in 138 moves,
while this need not take much more than a quarter of an hour.
But perhaps you will succeed in solving it in even fewer moves and much
faster!
Should you not be able to manage these fourteen blocks, however,
then there is always
the first, simplest variant, which is no more
than a trial version.
This puzzle belongs to the only type of three-square cover-uncover sliding
puzzle with a central covered square of six by six cells (at least as far
as boards smaller than twenty-one by twenty-one cells are concerned).
The total board of such an interactive puzzle consists of 100 cells.
In the initial arrangement the central covered square is completely covered
by a bigger central covering square of eight by eight tiles split up into
at least 8 different blocks.
In the final arrangement the central square of 36 cells is all that is
left open when the blocks with their 64 tiles are moved to the sides.
Once the central six-by-six square is uncovered,
you will see the lyrics of the
Six By Six in This Language.
It is a children's song sung in Tale Six of
Six Warlocks My Age.
In this short story, entitled "Numerically Superior", the senary system
(with base six) is vigorously, and not entirely unconvincingly, defended by
a community of warlocks (m/f) against those who attempt to impose a denary
system (with base ten) on them.
Like the society portrayed in that story this puzzle, too, seems to hover
between six and ten.
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