How to use the 2x2 solver
The cube is shown unfolded, so you can see all 24 stickers at once. Press Edit to clear the colors, then click the stickers of each color in turn: red first, then green, white, yellow, blue and finally orange.
The solver helps you along. It won't accept an impossible piece, such as a corner with two stickers of the same color, and it fills in the stickers it can work out for itself, so the last color is completed automatically. Any color scheme works.
When the cube on the screen matches yours, press Solve. The solution appears below the cube, both as a list of moves and as pictures with arrows.
Reading the solution
The 2x2 solver only uses three faces: F (front), R (right) and U (up). On a 2x2, turning a face clockwise rearranges the pieces the same way as turning the opposite face counterclockwise, so these three faces are enough. A letter on its own is a quarter turn clockwise, an apostrophe means counterclockwise and a 2 means a half turn. Our notation guide shows each move with pictures.
How the solver finds the shortest solution
The solver never turns the left, back or bottom face. So the corner where those three faces meet stays in place, and the other seven corners move around it.
That leaves two things to keep track of: where the seven corners are, and how each one is twisted. There are 5,040 ways to place them and 729 ways to twist them. Multiply the two and you get 3,674,160. That's every position the puzzle can be in.
When the page opens, your browser builds two small tables from these numbers. They tell the solver the fewest moves each part needs on its own. The solver then tries every 1-move solution, then every 2-move solution, and so on. It skips any path that the tables say can't finish in time. Since it counts up from the shortest length, the first answer it finds is the shortest one possible. All of this runs on your device, and nothing is sent to a server.
Tips for following the solution
- Hold your cube so it looks like the screen before you make the first move.
- Watch the bottom-back-left corner. The solution never moves it, so if it moved, you made a wrong turn. 💡
- Each step shows the move, such as R2 or U', next to a small picture of the cube with an arrow.
- If you press Solve on a cube that's already solved, the page asks you to scramble it first.
Play with the 2x2 simulator
Press Scramble for a random position and try to solve it yourself: click a face to turn it clockwise, as shown by the arrow. Reset brings back the solved cube.
Here's a quick look at the four buttons next to the cube. 🧩
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reset | Puts the cube back to solved and clears the old solution. |
| Scramble | Makes 80 random turns, so the cube is well mixed. |
| Edit | Blanks all 24 stickers so you can enter your own colors. |
| Solve | Finds the shortest solution. It works once every sticker has a color. |
How to solve the 2x2 cube yourself
The 2x2, also called the Pocket Cube or Mini Cube, is a Rubik's Cube with only corner pieces. That makes it a good first puzzle: if you know the corner steps of the 3x3 beginner's method, you can already solve it. Ruwix also has a dedicated 2x2 tutorial.
The puzzle has 3,674,160 possible positions, and every one of them can be solved in 11 moves or fewer. It's older than you might think: Larry Nichols patented a 2x2x2 puzzle in 1972, two years before Ernő Rubik built his first cube. Nichols' version held the pieces together with magnets. Today the 2x2 is an official World Cube Association event. For the full-size puzzle, use the 3x3 Rubik's Cube solver.