ARC-AGI-3 Game Mechanics

Guides to the 25 public demonstration games, plus separately labeled preview history. These are spoilers; the private competition games have different mechanics.

The Slippery Seven · Human and AI results · Markdown reference

• ft09 — The board is a grid of colored tiles with a few small marker squares mixed in. Each marker has a colored center and a border: a white border cell means the tile on that side must be the center color, a gray one means it must not be. Clicking a tile steps it to the next color. Satisfy every marker at once before your tile clicks run out.
• ls20 — You carry a key made of colored pixels and walk it over special tiles to change its shape, color, and rotation. Reach the door with the key matching the lock, before you run out of moves. Running out costs one of the level's three lives; lose all three on one level and the whole run ends.
• vc33 — White liquid sits in tanks divided by black walls. Clicking a blue pump moves liquid through a wall, raising one side and lowering the other, and the little riders sitting on the liquid go up and down with it. Get every rider level with the stripe of its own color on a wall next to it. From level 4, a gate in a wall turns orange when the liquid on both sides is exactly level with it; clicking it sends the riders across.
• ar25 — You move one or two Black pieces and the Light Blue mirror lines that reflect them across the board. Any Yellow target square touched by a piece or its Darker Gray reflection counts as covered. Clear a level by covering every target, often by moving the mirror instead of the piece.
• as66 (withdrawn preview) — You slide a block in one direction until it hits something. Get it to the exit while matching the exit's required color, and avoid enemies that kill you on contact.
• bp35 — You only move left and right. Whenever there is open space in the pull direction -- up, at the start of every level -- you get carried along until something solid stops you, and you cannot opt out. Click blocks to reshape the shaft: Green ones break, Orange ones switch between solid and see-through, Red ones flip the pull, and plain Purple ones break but grow into the empty cells around them. Reach the Light Pink plus, and never get carried into a Purple spike. The view shows only a slice of each level (about 10 rows of a shaft 32 to 50 rows tall), so the exit and the Red blocks usually start off-screen and you have to explore to find them.
• cd82 — You fire colored dye from eight stations around a small target square to recreate a reference pattern shown in the corner, before your move countdown runs out.
• cn04 — You hold one part at a time, slide and rotate it, until every printed mark on it lines up with a matching mark on another part.
• dc22 — You move the green square with the arrow keys, but only onto floor, and most of the path is missing. Buttons on the black panel to the right change the pieces of floor that match them: swinging bars, tiles that go solid or checkered, gaps that close, slabs that slide. Build the path, walk it to the yellow square, and do not press a button that removes the floor you are standing on: that costs 20 steps and is undone.
• g50t — Nothing tells you this up front, so figuring it out costs you a run: every move you make toward the goal is being recorded. The fifth action isn't a simple rewind — it walks you back to the start and spawns a ghost twin that performs that exact recorded sequence, move for move, right alongside whatever you do next. You're meant to use that twin to hold a pressure plate down while the real you goes finish the job. A timer bar drains as you act and ends the run if it empties first.
• ka59 — Click a green box to pick it, then move it with the arrow keys, 3 cells at a time. Drive it into another piece and your box stays put while the other piece gets knocked about 15 cells away. Fill every dark gray outline frame with a piece that fits it exactly before your steps run out.
• lf52 — It's peg solitaire: click a peg, then click where it lands, and the peg it jumped over is removed. Get down to one peg. From level 2 the arrow keys move rail carts that carry pegs between rooms, and every click or key press uses up a limited number of moves.
• lp85 — Each button turns a loop of squares one step forward (green) or back (red). Turn the loops until every yellow square sits inside a yellow target, marked by four corner dots, and on levels 3-4 the orange square sits in the orange one.
• m0r0 — You steer two mirror-image tokens that always move as opposite reflections of each other. You can't just walk them together — you have to knock one into a wall to break the mirroring, and repeat until both land on the same tile.
• r11l — It's an amoeba, or blob, with limbs. You can't move its body directly, but the body always re-centers between its limbs. In the early levels the body already has the colors its target wants; in later levels you have to move the body over food pellets to eat them, changing the body's color, until it matches what the target needs.
• re86 — You slide one outline piece at a time, switching between them, until every little target dot is covered by a piece of the same color, before your steps run out. Later levels add pads that repaint pieces and walls that bend or squash them.
• s5i5 — You click color-coded buttons to grow, shrink and later rotate telescoping rods, carrying the dots riding on them onto the hollow-diamond pins before your clicks run out.
• sb26 — You move colored tiles from a tray into containers, then run them so their colors get read out in order and checked against the row of colors at the top. Every run and every move costs energy, so don't waste them.
• sc25 — You draw a pattern on a small toggle grid; if it matches a known symbol, it casts a spell (teleport, grow/shrink, or fireball) that helps your wizard reach the exit.
• sk48 — You extend, pull back and slide a skewer to push colored beads around and skewer them. Get the beads on each skewer into the same color order as the reference skewer shown at the bottom before you run out of energy.
• sp80 — Move the red bars into place, then pour. The liquid falls, runs off the ends of bars, and has to fill every yellow cup without touching the light gray floor line. A failed pour is wiped and you try again, but only four failed pours are allowed per level.
• su15 — Clicking the board pulls everything near that point toward it, like a vacuum; the white ring that flashes around your click shows how far the pull reaches. Two or more blocks of the same size that come together fuse into one block of the next size up. The strip at the top-left shows that size chain in order; the pieces shown at the top-center are exactly what you have to deliver into the blue circles. Get that set, exactly -- no more and no fewer -- before your clicks run out.
• tn36 — You flip switches to build a short program of moves, turns, resizes and recolors, then run it on a yellow block to land it exactly in its target outline. Every click shortens the blue bar at the top, and you lose when it runs out.
• tr87 — You translate a phrase into a second alphabet by matching each symbol to its paired rune on the wall. In the last two levels the answer is already right, and you fix the wall of rune-pairs instead of translating.
• tu93 — Move your Blue token along the wires to the Green square before the Pink step bar runs out. From level 2 there are enemies: step onto one from the side or from behind and it dies, but stop on the spot in front of its dot and it kills you.
• wa30 — It's Sokoban — you grab crates and push or pull them into their bays — but starting on the second board another hauler is also moving crates, sometimes helping you and sometimes stealing your crate for the wrong spot.