Great Game! General Hints for the Stuck:

Hi all!

First, wanted to commend Lazy 8 for doing a great job on a very addicting game. Maybe it's just that I've always liked sliding puzzles, but I got through the whole thing no problem once I stopped trying to solve the puzzles linearly.

So, for those of you getting stuck, here are some tips that made my life super easy:

1. Always start by finding the final pattern you want to end up on. Aside from the rocketship puzzles, I can't think of any offhand where the puzzle was too complicated to see about how the gears and pipes have to line up in the end.

2. For square puzzles, solve the puzzle one row/column at a time. Don't forget that blanks often belong in some of these rows, even though they're not directly part of the solution! For example, if it's a 4x4 puzzle, I would solve it like this (Xs indicate pieces in the wrong place, 0s in the right place, _ is your blank space):

Scrambled:

XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX

Top row correct:

0000
XXXX
XX_X
XXXX

Top row, first col correct:

0000
0XXX
0X_X
0XXX

Top 2 rows, first col correct:

0000
0000
0XXX
0X_X

Then I solve from here (typically 5 moves or so).

The key advantage to solving this way is that once a row or col is correct, you don't need to move those pieces again.

3. This is the tricky part. If I solve this way and I get to the end where two adjacent tiles are swapped, then I have to mess up my carefully solved rows and cols. For Example:

0000
0000
0000
0XX_

This position is basically unsolvable without moving some things around. Fix this as follows:

3a. Find two pieces that are the same (on both sides if this is a two sided puzzle), which are an odd distance away from each other. For example, if I had the following setup with two L shaped pieces:

0000 L00L
0L00 0000
000L 0000
0XX_ 0XX_

In both of these examples, the two Ls are 3 apart. It would also be alright if the Ls were adjacent, since they'd be 1 apart then.

3b. Swap these two pieces (you'll have to mess up the puzzle quite a bit to do this obviously) but put the others you had correct all back in the same place.

3c. You'll notice that your two pieces which were swapped at the bottom are correct! All through the magic of math.

4. If you're OCD like me, optimization and speed come with practice on any given puzzle. If you're stuck trying to get Master Mechanic on a puzzle, solve a few more and then come back. You may be surprised how your brain learns new tricks as the puzzles go on.

I found that 90% of the puzzles could be Master Mechanic'd in 3 tries or less using this method. The other 10% are the rocketship puzzles (just keep practicing), a few of the trickier circular puzzles, and the last puzzle of the game. Hope all this text was helpful!

Let me know if you guys end up with an expansion in the future - I'd surely buy it!