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How to solve Tilt: read the last move, then use marbles as walls

Eigengames team · 6 October 2026 · 5 min read

▶ Play Tilt🎯 Try a board where a parked marble must move

Three marbles, one ring left, and it sits in open space in the middle of the board. Every swipe sends the blue marble sailing straight past it. You can’t nudge a marble one square in Tilt. It goes until something stops it, and in open space nothing does.

That one rule explains nearly everything about the game. To get good at Tilt, stop asking “how do I get the marble there?” and start asking “what will stop it there?”

Nothing stops in the open

A marble stops for exactly three reasons: it reaches the edge of the board, it hits a dark wall, or it hits another marble. That’s the whole physics, and it comes straight from the game’s code. When you tilt, the marble furthest along the direction moves first, then the one behind it slides up against it. A chain of marbles packs together neatly instead of tangling.

So every ring on the board is a promise. When the puzzle was made, the marbles really were tilted into those positions, so on the final move each ring has an edge, a wall or a marble right next to it in the direction of that tilt. Look at any ring in open space and ask what is going to hold the marble there. If there’s no wall next to it, the answer is another marble.

Read the last move off the rings

Here’s the most useful habit we found, and it costs nothing: before your first swipe, picture the solved board and tilt it in your head. The last move of any solution has to be a direction in which the finished position doesn’t move. If tilting the rings left would make a marble slide, then left can’t be your last move.

We ran the game’s own solver over 400 Normal boards to see how much this narrows things down. On 48% of them only one direction leaves the finished position still, so the rings tell you exactly what the final tilt is. On almost all the rest there are two candidates. You are now solving backwards from a known last step, which is a much smaller puzzle.

Then take one more step back. Before that last tilt, each marble must sit somewhere in line with its ring, on the far side, with a clear run to it. In the figure, blue and orange both have to arrive on the ring row from the right, and blue has to be behind orange. That ordering is already most of the solution.

Use one marble as the wall for another

Look at the figure again: the blue ring has no wall beside it. The only thing that can hold blue there is orange. This isn’t an odd case. On 53% of Normal boards at least one ring is held in place by another marble on the final tilt. On Hard, with four marbles, it’s 70%.

So plan in pairs. When one ring sits right behind another in the direction of the last tilt, the front marble is the back marble’s wall: the front one stops against an edge or a wall, and the back one stops against it. If a ring has nothing beside it at all, look for the marble that will be parked next to it first. A parked marble is just a wall you brought with you.

The same goes on the way there. Halfway through a solution a marble often sits in a strange spot for one reason: the next tilt needs something to stop against there. If a marble seems to be wasting a move, check whether it is really being placed as a stopper.

Sometimes a parked marble has to leave

This is the counter-intuitive one. Getting a marble onto its ring early feels like progress. Often it is. But the solver says otherwise surprisingly often: on 34% of Normal boards no par route keeps every parked marble on its ring. On 14% of Normal boards you can’t solve it at all without moving a parked marble off again, because a marble sitting on its ring blocks the only route the others have. On Hard, 64% of boards need at least one unparking.

We measured this by running the solver twice on each board: once normally, and once with a rule that a marble on its own ring may never leave it. When the second search came back longer than par, or found no solution at all, the board needs an unparking. Where the restricted search did find a solution, it cost an average of five extra moves on Normal, which is far more than any leaderboard forgives.

So when you’re stuck one move from a good position, check the marble you were proudest of parking. If it’s sitting in the doorway every other marble needs, lift it, let the others through, and bring it back on the last tilt.

How long a board should take

On Normal the par is never below 5. Across our 400-board sample it was 5 moves on 37% of boards, 6 on 25%, 7 on 20%, and 8 or more on the remaining 18%. The board itself is always 7 by 7, with between four and eight walls. If you’re well past par, stop swiping and go back to the rings: check which last tilt they allow, and which marble has to be whose wall.

Practice

The practice board starts with a marble already sitting on its ring in the bottom-right corner, and it’s a trap: the solver finds no way to finish while that marble stays put. Par is 6. Use undo freely. The question to ask on every swipe is the same one: what will stop it?

When a marble won’t stay where you want it, bring the wall with you.

▶ Play Tilt🎯 Try a board where a parked marble must move