How to play Tickwork: rules and the counting strategy
Everything you need to play Tickwork, plus tips to get a better score.
How to play
- Turn every arrow so it points up, in as few pushes as possible.
- Tap a gear to push it: it turns a quarter turn clockwise, and every gear it meshes with turns a quarter turn anticlockwise. Nothing else moves.
- An arrow is right when it points straight up: the little mark above the gear lights up gold and the arrow turns green. When every arrow is up at par, the puzzle ends by itself and the whole mechanism spins; with more pushes a Finish button appears: hand it in, or undo and keep trying.
- Only gears whose teeth touch are neighbours; a gap between two gears means they don't affect each other. Size doesn't matter: a big brass gear turns just like a small one. From Wednesday, gears can form loops.
- The order of your pushes never matters, only how many times you push each gear. Four pushes make a full turn, so each gear needs 0 to 3.
- Touch and hold a gear (or point at it with the mouse) to light up the gears it meshes with, without pushing it. You can turn this off in Settings, along with the ratchet sound and vibration.
- Locked gears (grey steel with a padlock; on Wednesdays, Thursdays and weekends) can't be pushed: they just jam. Their neighbours still turn them.
- Heavy gears (copper with a dashed ring, always one of the biggest; on Fridays and weekends) turn half a turn when pushed. Their neighbours still turn a quarter, and a neighbour's push turns them a quarter.
- The counter shows your pushes / par. Par is the fewest pushes possible. Match it for ⭐⭐⭐, go over by one or two for ⭐⭐, more for ⭐.
- Undo (↶ or Z) and Start over (⟲) are free: only the pushes in your final solution count.
- On a keyboard: Tab moves between gears, Enter or Space pushes, Z undoes.
- The shared result shows your stars, pushes and par, and one ⚙️ per gear (the size of the day's mechanism, never your solution). 🔥 counts the days in a row you've solved it.
- The week gets harder: Monday is a chain of 5 gears and each day adds more, up to 12 on Sunday. Loops appear from Wednesday; locked gears on Wednesdays, Thursdays and weekends (two on Sunday); a heavy gear on Fridays and weekends.
Strategy: count, don't shuffle
Here's the secret: the order of your pushes never matters. Pushing A then B leaves the board exactly as B then A. All that matters is how many times you push each gear, and four pushes bring a gear back where it started, so each gear needs 0, 1, 2 or 3 pushes.
So think per gear. A gear ends up pointing up when its own pushes, minus the pushes of its neighbours, make up the quarter turns it's missing.
Example: three gears in a row, A – B – C, with arrows ⬅️ ⬇️ ⬅️. A and C each need one quarter turn clockwise; B needs half a turn.
Push A: it turns one step clockwise (up!) and turns B one step back. Push C: same for C, and B turns one more step back. B has now turned half a turn, so it points up too.
Two pushes, in any order: that's par. As counts: A = 1, B = 0, C = 1. For every gear, its own pushes minus its neighbours' pushes equal exactly the turns it was missing.
More tips: solve the ends of a chain first, since a gear with one neighbour depends on just two counts; a locked gear's count is always zero, so its neighbours must do all the work; and a heavy gear moves in steps of two, so its neighbours decide whether it lands on an odd step.