15 Puzzle — play the classic sliding tile puzzle free in your browser

The 15 puzzle is the original sliding puzzle: fifteen numbered tiles and one empty space in a 4×4 frame. The rule is beautifully simple — slide tiles into the gap until they read 1 to 15 in order. Tap any tile in the same row or column as the gap and the whole segment glides across at once, just like the real plastic toy.

Play free here with no download, on phone or desktop. Every shuffle is generated by legal moves, so it is always solvable — and both your fewest-moves record and your fastest time are saved on your device, so there's always a number to beat.

How to play

• Tap (or click) a tile that shares a row or column with the empty space — every tile between it and the gap slides in one go.
• On desktop, arrow keys slide the neighboring tile into the gap (e.g. ← moves the tile right of the gap leftwards).
• Tiles turn green when they're in their home square. Get all 15 green to win.
• ⟳ SHUFFLE (or the R key) deals a fresh board instantly. Fewest moves and fastest time are both tracked.

The 1880 craze and Sam Loyd's impossible $1,000 hoax

In 1880 the 15 puzzle set off one of the first puzzle manias in history. Credited to Noyes Palmer Chapman, a New York postmaster, the little wooden toy swept across America and Europe within months — newspapers reported workers sneaking games on the job, and in France it was denounced as a public nuisance "worse than tobacco". Decades later, puzzle showman Sam Loyd claimed he had invented it and offered $1,000 (a fortune then) to anyone who could solve his version, which started with only the 14 and 15 tiles swapped.

The prize was never paid — because it couldn't be. Swapping exactly two tiles creates an odd permutation, and every legal slide preserves the board's parity, so no sequence of moves can ever fix it. Exactly half of all 4×4 arrangements are unsolvable, which is why this game shuffles by playing hundreds of real moves from the solved position instead of scattering tiles at random: every board you get here can be beaten.

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