Elm Crate Slides

Elm Crate Slides is a quiet wooden puzzle duel about a tray of twenty-five cubes that never grows and never shrinks. Every cube stays in the crate forever. What changes is which face is showing, and where in the tray each cube sits, because on every single turn a whole row or column slides one step along. HOW A TURN WORKS Lift one cube from the sixteen that sit on the outer ring. You may only take a cube that is blank or already shows your own cross, never one that shows your rival's circle. Turn it so your cross faces up, then push it back into the tray from either end of the row or the column it came from. Everything between the hole and that end steps along by one. You are never allowed to drop it straight back into the gap it just left, so the tray moves on every turn, including yours. Line up five of your crosses in any row, any column or either diagonal and the tray is yours. THE TWIST THAT MAKES IT HURT Because the whole line travels, the four in a row you carefully built can be shoved apart by your own forced move. And if a single push completes five for both players at once, the player who moved is the one who loses. The same goes for a slide that finishes your rival's line and not your own. Before you commit, look hard at what your push is handing over. WHAT IS INSIDE - A hand-drawn elm tray with bevelled cream cubes, rendered entirely with vector drawing. There is not a single image file in the app. - Three opponents. The Apprentice picks sensibly at random. The Journeyman looks one move ahead and checks it is not handing you a five. The Cabinetmaker runs a three-ply search with alpha-beta pruning and will punish a loose push. - Twelve thin gauges around the tray edge, one for every winning line, filling red for you and blue for your rival. A line both of you have touched goes dark, because it can never be finished. - A full slide animation you can slow right down, so you can watch exactly which cubes moved and where your line went. - A record book that remembers trays played, trays won, win rate, average turns, fastest win, lines of five completed, longest open run, best winning streak and the number of times you stepped around a move that would have lost the game under your own hand. - Nine carved plaques to earn on the workshop shelf. - An illustrated explainer that walks through lift, turn and push one diagram at a time, plus notes on tactics and on reading the edge gauges. - Choose who opens each tray: you, your rival, or alternating. COMPLETELY OFFLINE, COMPLETELY QUIET No internet connection is used or needed. No ads. No analytics. No accounts, no sign-in, no data collection. No sound at all, not one note, so the game is welcome on a train, in a waiting room or beside a sleeping baby. Optional touch feedback gives you a short buzz when a cube lifts and when it lands, and you can switch that off too. Your progress and your settings are stored on your own device and survive closing the app. The rules fit in a paragraph. Getting good at them takes rather longer, because in this crate the ground moves under everyone, yourself included.