Sliding Number Puzzle — the digital Huarong Dao
One empty square, a board of shuffled numbers, and one job: slide every tile home.
Huarong Dao is a classic Chinese sliding puzzle, named after a famous escape in the Three Kingdoms story. Our digital version keeps the same simple heart: numbered tiles fill a grid, one square stays empty, and tiles can only slide into the gap. Your task is to work through the chaos until the numbers run in perfect order, left to right, top to bottom.
The classic sliding-numbers game — in China it is called Digital Huarong Dao, after the famous Three Kingdoms escape puzzle. Slide the tiles into the empty space until the numbers run 1, 2, 3 … in order, with the empty space last.
How to play
Choose a 3×3, 4×4 or 5×5 board and press Shuffle to start. Click or tap any tile next to the empty square to slide it in. The board counts your moves and your time, and remembers your best result for each board size.
What you learn
Solving it trains planning: every slide changes what the next slide can do, so you learn to think two or three moves ahead, and to park finished tiles without trapping yourself. It is patience, logic and pattern-spotting on one small board.
Want more? Browse the whole Interactive Geometry Lab for nine hands-on math toys, or build a personalised math adventure for your child with the free Game Builder. Everything is free, with no sign-up.
✓ Last checked November 2, 2026 — we re-test this tool every week to make sure it still works.