Picture Scramble Java Game
This is the classic 4x4 puzzle game that turns up in cereal boxes
made from plastic tiles. You scramble the image then slide the tiles
around to unscramble it again. It uses the Java "Swing" interface
to provide nice drop-down menus.
The original was written by Nicholas W. Sayer and you can find,
the original author's homepage
here.
I haven't got this to work inside a web
page yet so for the time being just download it and run it as
an application from your machine
Strategy
The most important thing to notice is where the final tile
will go (i.e. in the bottom left-hand corner) and then start work
on the side away from that. The more room you have, the easier
it is to move tiles around without messing up what you already have.
The other thing to consider is that if you slide any "snake-like"
set of tiles along through any shape, you can reverse the slide
but just sliding them all back. Thus, if you need a little bit
extra room, just slide the set of finished tiles around and then
when you have made your shuffle, slide them all back into position.
Finally, when you are down to just a few tiles out of place
(i.e. 5 tiles), there are only limited possible moves available
that have a significant effect on the layout so stepping through
those moves will always sort out the last few tiles.
Index of Java Games