Ravle

Ravle crosses the sliding puzzle with a word game: a square board, one empty space, and the requirement that each row must form a word. All those words share a theme, shown above the board under the heading TODAY'S CATEGORY, and the rules panel stresses a point easy to forget: the rows are separate words, not a sentence to be read straight across. Movement is that of a sliding puzzle. You select a tile in the row or column of the empty space, and everything between it and the empty space advances as a block. Two formats coexist, 4 × 4 and 5 × 5, selectable at the top of the screen. Below the board, a status bar shows the moves made, the checks requested, and an active solve timer with pause, flanked by the buttons Check board and Reveal answer and by the legend of the three hints: Right place, Wrong place in this row, Not in this row.

1. Choose the format at the top of the board: 4 × 4 or 5 × 5. Each keeps its own progress and is automatically paused when you switch to the other.
2. Read the day's category: it's the common theme for all the answers on the board, and often the only entry point.
3. Slide letters toward the empty space. Select any tile in the row or column of the empty space: all tiles between that tile and the empty space move together, and the entire slide counts as a single move.
4. Form one word per row. In 4 × 4 the answers are 4, 4, 4 then 3 letters; in 5 × 5 they are 5, 5, 5, 5 then 4. The panel adds that the final, shorter word is adjacent to the empty space.
5. Press Check board to get hints for each row. Checking does not end the attempt, it provides information.
6. Rearrange the board in light of those hints, then check again: a check that comes up correct ends and records the puzzle.

Because Ravle finally makes the sliding-puzzle frustration useful. Every letter is already there, in front of you, yet misplaced: it's no longer a vocabulary problem but a logistics one, and the game counts slides, not ideas. The real cleverness lies in the locality of the hints. An amber that speaks only of its row, a gray that sends a letter to a neighbor row, a green that you may still need to move. You stop reading the board as a crossword and start seeing a network of exchanges between rows. Add a shared theme that guides four or five answers at once, a timer that stops when you pause, and a check you can request without penalty, and the puzzle becomes surprisingly comfy for such a tricky object.

Three colors, and one crucial detail: they apply only to the row where the tile sits. Green means the letter is correct and in the right place in that row, while warning that you may still need to move it during rearrangements. Amber means the letter belongs to that row but in a different position. Gray means it doesn't belong in that row and should join another row. The panel repeats the common mistake: amber never means "somewhere on the board," and a gray tile is not useless, it's a visiting tile. Each tile also carries a symbol in its corner, a checkmark, a dot, or a cross, so reading the hints does not rely on color alone. Beside this code, the status bar keeps the counts: one move per slide, one unit per check, and a solve timer that stops during pauses. Reveal answer ends the attempt and excludes it from ranked results.

4 × 4

The small board: four rows whose answers are 4, 4, 4 then 3 letters.

5 × 5

The large board: five rows of 5, 5, 5, 5 then 4 letters. It keeps its progress separately from the 4 × 4, and the two are automatically paused when you switch between them.

• An entire slide costs only one move. Pushing four letters in one gesture is therefore four times cheaper than moving them one by one: look for the long move before the obvious one.
• Don't discard gray tiles. Gray does not mean "letter absent from the board," it means "letter housed in the wrong row": it's an indication of destination, not rejection.
• Check early. Check board does not end the attempt and the panel explicitly encourages using it as soon as information is lacking, even though each check is counted.
• Save Reveal answer for days when the leaderboard doesn't matter to you: it closes the attempt and removes it from ranked results.