About the KubicRube online puzzle
The KubicRube puzzle is a sliding puzzle inspired by the Rubik’s Cube puzzle of the eighties. The KubicRube loses one of the Rubik’s Cube’s three dimensions to become a flat sliding puzzle with only one side visible. It’s as if the Rubik’s Cube has been run over by a steamroller but amazingly still works!
Click or touch and drag to slide the rows and columns from back to front and front to back. Double click to flip back and forwards between the front and back sides. The puzzle is made a bit more trickier as the hearts and clubs, when slid vertically from back to the front, turn upside down!
The Rube has an invisible (computational) mechanism which enables the front part to rotate to the back and visa versa in the same manner as the Rubik’s Cube. If one of the Rube’s rows is slid left or right (or one of the columns slid up or down), the row/column starts to disappear to the rear of the Rube and the rear-facing row/column of the Rube starts to become visible. The Rube behaves inconsistently with its two dimensional identity as it has a front and back surface surface much like a thin piece of paper (although in the imaginary world of the computer it can still be thought of as having zero depth and therefore being 2D).
To make the puzzle a bit more difficult the KubicRube uses Hearts and Clubs symbols instead of coloured squares. These markers are asymmetric (orientated either upwards or downwards) and therefore change direction when the column of the Rube is slid vertically from the front to the back or from the back to the front. In order to change orientation of the marker symbol, one must rotate the row horizontally and then the appropriate column (containing the symbol) vertically to the front again. The puzzle starts off having 2 rows/columns and increases by one the row/column count each time the puzzle is completed. This puzzle is also available to play as an app on Facebook.
Click to play KubicRube on Facebook