How to play Packing Problems & Puzzles

Every game is played by getting shapes onto the board — most of the time you just drag a piece from the tray and drop it where you want it. The board, the tray, and an on-screen control pad work the same way with a mouse, a finger, or a stylus. Keyboard shortcuts are available on desktop — see the reference below — but never required. Each game's own guide covers what makes it special; this page is the controls they all share.

Common controls

• Drag and drop: On a mouse or stylus, press a tray piece, drag it onto the board, and release to drop it. On a touchscreen, hold the piece until it lifts, drag it onto the board, then release to drop — the brief hold is what lets a plain swipe scroll the tray instead of grabbing a piece. A preview shows where it will land as you drag.
• Tap or click to place: Instead of dragging, tap (touch) or click (mouse) a tray piece to select it, then tap or click a board cell to drop it there.
• Swipe the board: In Number Merge and Falling Blocks, swipe across the board to slide the tiles or steer the falling piece.
• Scroll the tray: When the tray holds more pieces than fit, scroll it with the mouse wheel, a swipe on touch, or the arrow buttons that appear at its ends — click one to nudge, or press and hold to keep scrolling.
• Undo / Reset: Most games have an undo button; the reset button starts a fresh board (labelled Clear or New game depending on the game).
• On-screen keys: The header toggle cycles off → right-handed → left-handed. Turn the control pad off if you play by keyboard, drag, or tap alone; when on, it sits — along with the panel — on the side you pick. Keyboard shortcuts work either way.

Control pad and keyboard

On square boards, the on-screen control pad is a 2×3 cluster of direction buttons with two corners above, plus a flip / delete button alongside. Triangle boards use a six-button hexagonal ring instead, matching their six lattice directions. Both pads mirror the keyboard, so you can play by touch, mouse, or keys interchangeably. A game shows only the buttons it needs, and each button's icon says what it does (move, rotate, drop, or nudge) — so the corners are not always rotation, and not every key is active in every game.

Action keys — act on the selected piece:

Pad keys — by the button's position on the pad:

The Home / End / Page Up / Page Down keys and the numpad match the pad on a full keyboard; WASD, Q, and E cover laptops.

On the triangle pad, the six directions use Q / E, A / D, and Z / C, or numpad 7 / 9, 4 / 6, and 1 / 3. The left and right arrows also move directly left and right.

By control style

Most games fall into a few families that share how you play them; each game's own guide fills in the rest.

• Drop & fill — drag or tap pieces from the tray onto the board to fill it or clear lines. Rotate and flip to make a piece fit, and take a placed piece back by double-tapping it, pressing Delete, or dragging it off the board.
• Slide-out — slide blocks around a crowded board to free one piece or send it to its exit. Drag a block and it follows your finger, turning corners, or select it and slide one cell at a time with the pad or keys; one slide, however far, counts as one step.
• Slide-in — stage each piece in the loading zone beside the board, turn it there if the level allows, then slide it a cell at a time into the region until it fills up. Order matters: reach the tight spots while their paths are open.