Collect keys in order, then slide through the unlocked exit
Air Hockey is a sliding puzzle set on a frictionless 13×13 rink enclosed by border walls. Your puck glides in a chosen direction and travels in a perfectly straight line until it collides with a border wall or one of the blocks placed across the rink. It stops at the last open cell before the collision. From that new position, you choose the next direction and repeat. The objective is to collect three numbered keys in order — key 1, key 2, then key 3 — and then slide the puck out through the exit.
You must complete three progressively harder stages back to back. The key sequence and exit position for each stage are generated as part of a verified solvable path, so every puzzle guarantees at least one solution. Easy stages require a minimum of 8 slides to complete. Medium stages require at least 13. Hard stages require at least 18. The puzzle's difficulty comes from the spatial reasoning needed to find the correct route efficiently, not from impossibility.
Air Hockey exercises logical reasoning most heavily — every move must be planned against the physical constraints of what the puck can actually reach from its current position. Pattern recognition helps you quickly identify which blocks serve as useful stopping points and which slides lead to dead ends. Processing speed matters in translating a mental route into fast inputs once you have the path figured out.
Use arrow keys, WASD, or swipe gestures to choose a sliding direction. The puck travels in that direction until it hits a border or block, then stops at the last open cell before the obstacle. You cannot stop the puck mid-slide or adjust its path while it is moving — the direction is committed the moment you input it. From the new stopping position, you choose the next direction and continue.
Collect key 1, key 2, and key 3 in numbered order. Passing over a key out of order does nothing — it stays on the board until the preceding keys have been collected. The exit remains locked until all three keys are in hand. Once the exit unlocks, the pulsing exit arrow marks the open escape. To exit, you must slide the puck in the direction of that arrow — the exit is always on the left or right border, and the puck must reach the border to escape.
There is no move limit and no penalty for extra moves. Only total time matters. Resetting a stage is always free — if you lose track of the route or overshoot a critical position, resetting and approaching with a clearer mental model almost always saves more time than grinding through a suboptimal path.
Scoring: Scoring uses time-based exponential decay applied to the total time across all three stages, using a 30-second half-life formula. Completing all three stages in 10 seconds yields roughly 7,900 points. Finishing in 30 seconds gives 5,000 points. One minute gives about 2,500 points. Two minutes gives around 625 points. The blocks on the board range from 16 to 25 depending on difficulty, creating a denser stopping-point network on harder stages. Knowing the route cleanly is worth far more than moving fast on an unclear one.
Air Hockey
Collect three keys in order, then slide the puck out through the exit across three stages.
Work backwards from each key. Do not ask where the puck can go from its current position. Ask where the puck needs to be just before it collects the next key — specifically, what stopping position lets a straight slide pass directly through that key. Once you identify that setup position, ask which block or wall would catch the puck there. This two-step reverse planning is far more reliable than exploring forward and hoping to stumble across the key.
Every block is a tool, not an obstacle. The blocks scattered across the rink exist to create stopping points. Before choosing a direction, look at where the puck would stop in each of the four cardinal directions from your current position, and evaluate whether any of those landing spots opens a useful next slide. A block that stops you adjacent to the current key is valuable. A wide-open slide that sends you into an unproductive corner is not. Reframe every block as a potential anchor in the route.
Understand the puck's physics completely. The puck never stops in open space — it always travels until it hits something. This means the only valid stopping positions are cells immediately adjacent to a wall or block. You cannot park the puck at an arbitrary interior point. When you need the puck at a specific cell, you must find either a block directly beyond it (to catch a slide coming from the near side) or a block directly before it (to catch a slide from the far side). Mentally simulating which cells are reachable from your current position is the core skill of the game.
Use locked keys as landmarks. Keys 2 and 3 are visible on the board before you collect them, even though they cannot be picked up out of order. Their positions reveal the general direction the solution route is heading. You should generally be maneuvering toward the side of the board where the next key sits, not away from it. If you find yourself moving away from both remaining keys, you have likely taken a suboptimal branch.
Reset early, not late. If you have spent more than fifteen seconds on a single key without making clear progress, resetting is almost certainly faster than continuing. The time cost of a reset is fixed and usually small — a clean restart with a revised mental model of the path recovers quickly. Continuing to probe an incorrect route wastes time at an accelerating rate as the board gets more confusing.
Use the exit as a planning anchor on hard stages. On Hard stages with 18-plus required slides, the exit is far from the starting position by design. As soon as you collect the final key, immediately identify the slide direction that reaches the exit border. If the puck is not positioned for that shot, plan one or two repositioning slides before the exit becomes available, so you do not waste time improvising after the key collect.
