Circle Puzzle

Circle Puzzle is a meshed-gear alignment puzzle · a little Swiss-watch movement. You get a stack of concentric wheels, each rotated to a random starting position. Tap the RIGHT half of a wheel to turn it clockwise, the LEFT half to turn it counter-clockwise · and because the wheels are meshed, every neighbour turns with it by a different, hidden amount. The goal is to bring every wheel's marker around to the guide at the top · all wheels aligned. There is no move limit and no fail state, so you can solve it at your own pace.

How one wheel moves the others. The wheels form a gear chain: each wheel is coupled only to its immediate neighbours, and each coupling has its own fixed ratio for the whole round. Tapping a wheel always turns it exactly one notch · and drags each neighbour by its ratio, somewhere between two notches backwards and two notches forwards. The ratios never change mid-round, so the puzzle is fully predictable: tap a wheel once, note how far (and in which direction) each neighbour jumped, and you have measured that coupling for the rest of the round.

You can calculate your way to the answer. First figure out how the wheels move: probe each wheel once and read off its ratios. Then plan · every tap is repeatable, so "three taps left on the outer wheel, then two right on the inner" always does the same thing. Turning one wheel to line it up knocks its neighbours out, so you trade offsets up and down the chain until every marker sits at the top at once. Careful bookkeeping beats trial and error.

Difficulty grows the stack. Easy rounds have two wheels and coarse notches. Harder rounds add wheels (up to four), use finer notches (more notches per turn), and scramble the start further · more couplings to deduce and longer trips for every marker.

Deterministic. The wheel count, the notch resolution, the hidden coupling, and every wheel's starting offset are all derived from the round seed · so the same save code is always the exact same puzzle. Useful for "try to do it in fewer taps" challenges with a friend on the same round.

Part of the PlayMemorize family of brain-training games. Runs entirely in your browser, works offline as a Progressive Web App.