Arkadium's Flip Out

How to play Arkadium's Flip Out

A grid of tiles, each showing one of two faces.

• Click or tap a tile to flip it.
• The tiles next to it flip at the same time, so every move touches several squares.
• The level is solved when every tile shows the same face.
• Flipping a tile twice returns the board to where it started, so nothing is unrecoverable.
• Later levels add larger grids and shapes that make the neighbour rule harder to hold in your head.

There is no clock. Sit with a board as long as you need.

Two facts that change everything

The first is that pressing a tile twice does nothing. The board comes back exactly as it was. So in any solution, every tile is either pressed once or not at all. There is no such thing as pressing something three times.

The second follows from it: the order does not matter. Press five tiles in any sequence you like and the result is identical. A solution is not a path, it is a set.

That is why hunting for the right sequence is wasted effort. There is no sequence. There is only the question of which tiles belong in the set.

Tips and strategy

Chase the lights down

The reliable method for boards of this kind is mechanical, and it works far better than intuition.

Look only at the top row. For every tile in it that is on the wrong face, press the tile directly beneath it. That fixes the top row and scrambles the second.

Now look at the second row and do the same thing, pressing into the third. Keep going down the grid. Each pass permanently settles the row above it, because you never touch that row again.

When you reach the bottom, the whole board is solved except possibly the last row.

The last row

If the bottom row is already uniform, you are finished. If it is not, the pattern left there tells you what to do.

Every unsolved bottom row corresponds to a specific set of top row presses. Press those, then run the chase again from the top. The second pass clears everything.

You do not need to memorise which pattern maps to which presses. On the small grids there are only a handful, and after a few levels your hand learns them without you deciding to.

Working the smaller boards by eye

For a grid of nine or sixteen tiles, the chase is overkill. Look for corners instead.

• A corner tile has the fewest neighbours, so pressing it changes the least.
• The centre of an odd grid touches the most, so it is the strongest single move.
• Symmetry is your friend. If the board looks the same flipped left to right, the solution usually is too.

What to stop doing

• Pressing tiles because they are on the wrong face. That is the instinct and it is wrong. You press a tile to fix its neighbour, not itself.
• Trying to solve the board in one region and then moving on. Regions are not independent here, which is the whole point of the puzzle.
• Restarting when it looks worse. It often looks worse one move before it is solved. There is no penalty for pressing on.
• Searching for a clever order. There is no order. Only the set.

When the grid stops being square

Later levels drop the neat rectangle and give you shapes with holes in them, or edges that wrap. The chase still works, but the rule about which tiles are neighbours changes, and that is the part people get wrong.

Before starting one of these, press a single tile in an empty area and watch exactly which squares respond. Five seconds spent confirming the neighbour pattern saves you from solving the wrong puzzle for the next five minutes.

Corner and edge tiles matter more on irregular boards than on square ones, because they have fewer neighbours and therefore fewer side effects.

If you like this kind of thinking

Lumeno and 10x10 sit in the same corner of the collection, where the rules are tiny and the difficulty comes entirely from consequences. Pull Pin rewards planning several moves out. The rest are in puzzle and skill.