Shift Master

━━ ONE EMPTY SPACE. FIFTEEN TILES. NO SHORTCUTS. ━━ The 15-puzzle has existed for over a century. The rules have never changed. Shift Master brings it to mobile with twenty levels of hand-tuned scrambles, a clean warm interface, and a move-count scoring system that rewards patience and planning. ━━ THE RULES ━━ A 4×4 grid holds tiles numbered 1 through 15, with one empty space. Tap any tile adjacent to the empty space — it slides in. Your goal is to arrange all fifteen tiles in order from 1 to 15, left to right, top to bottom, with the empty space in the bottom-right corner. Every scramble in Shift Master is generated from the goal state by applying a fixed number of valid moves. Every scramble is solvable. The question is how many moves it takes you. ━━ 20 LEVELS ━━ Level 0 starts with a light scramble — solvable in roughly twenty moves for an experienced player. By level nineteen, the board has been scrambled with over a hundred random moves and the path back to order requires serious planning. Each level has a three-star move threshold that scales with the scramble depth. A level scrambled deeper requires more moves to solve, but the three-star target requires you to solve it efficiently — not just correctly. ━━ STAR RATING ━━ Three stars: solve within the optimal-range move limit Two stars: solve within the extended move limit One star: any completion ━━ WARM WOOD AESTHETIC ━━ Shift Master uses a warm dark-brown interface with cream-colored tiles and orange-brown buttons. The sliding grid fills most of the screen. There are no animations to wait through, no timers to stress about — just the puzzle, your move count, and your next decision. ━━ A TIMELESS PUZZLE ━━ No tutorial required. No progression gates. All twenty levels are available from the start. Come back to earlier ones to chase a better score, or push forward into the deep scrambles for a genuine challenge.