Cube Games

Rotate, roll or match — the thinking end of the cube.

Sudoku Puzzle Cube

Football Cube Puzzle

Cube to Hole Puzzle

Cube Puzzle

Cube King Puzzle_GAme

Minecraft Cube Puzzle

The shape that does everything

A cube is the simplest thing a game engine can draw, and designers have used that in every direction. Sometimes the cube is the puzzle: a rotating color cube to solve, a grid of cubes to clear by matching, a cube you roll across a floor so that a painted face lands on a target. Sometimes the cube is the player: a jumping block dodging spikes to a beat, a runner sliding between lanes, a cube stacking cubes. The label gathers every title tagged or named cube, so all three live here together.

The puzzle branch is the largest and shares its shelf with puzzle games generally and block puzzle games in particular, where cubes are the pieces you drop and clear. The rolling and rotating titles are the ones that need a moment of thought before each move, and the 3D games hub holds the rest of the spatial puzzles that stop being cubes but keep the depth.

Categories:Puzzle3D

Puzzle, runner or platformer

The rotating cube puzzles are patient games: a scrambled set of colored faces, a few moves you can make, and the goal of getting each face to one color. Browser versions offer a scramble button, a timer and sometimes a solver hint, and they are best played with a mouse. The rolling-cube puzzles are shorter — a floor of tiles, a cube that tips over one edge at a time, and a target that only counts if the right face is down — and they are perfect thumb games.

The runners are the opposite mood. A cube dashes right, you tap to jump, and a spike, a saw or a gap ends the run instantly; the difficulty comes from a rhythm you learn by dying, which is the same idea behind the geometry dash games and the wider jumping games shelf. A few cube platformers slow that down into levels with checkpoints, and the endless stacking titles — tap when the sliding cube lines up — are the arcade end, next to stacking games.

Blocky worlds and where to go next

Not every cube game is abstract. The blocky survival and crafting worlds are built entirely from cubes, and a search for the word turns up a fair number of them; they are sandbox games in a cube skin and play very differently from a puzzle, with a first-person view, WASD and a world to dig. Those sit more naturally under minecraft games, which are fan-made third-party titles, and the chunky low-resolution look in general belongs to the pixel games hub.

Cube games are friendly to every age: the color puzzles are quiet and can take an hour, the rolling puzzles are calm enough for young children, and the rhythm runners are as hard as you want them to be. Everything runs in the browser with nothing to install. For more of the twitch reflexes the runners demand, the obstacle games hub is the next stop; for more spatial thinking, the sorting games hub scratches the same itch.