Three towers, five discs and one target arrangement in view the whole time. Rebuild the target in as few moves as you can, inside two minutes. It can be done in nine.
PlanningStrategic thinkingDeliberation
Unofficial practice. Not the real Pymetrics game and not connected to
Pymetrics, Harver or any employer.
A 2-minute run,
unlimited retries, nothing saved and nothing sent anywhere.
How the Pymetrics towers game works
The target sits above the board and stays there for the whole run. You never have to remember it.
Tap a tower to lift its top disc, then tap another tower to drop it. Only the top disc of a tower can move, and only one at a time.
There is no size rule. Any disc can sit on any other disc, so the only thing that matters is the order the colours end up in.
Every puzzle on this page can be solved in exactly nine moves. Whether you find those nine is the point.
Undo takes back your last move and Reset puts the whole board back to the start. Both are in the real game too.
You have two minutes. The run ends when the board matches the target, or when the clock does.
What the towers game measures
Two things, and the first matters more than most people expect: how long you sit still before your first move, and how many moves you spend. A long pause followed by a short efficient solve is a planner. An instant first move followed by a lot of shuffling is a searcher. It also quietly counts every move you made rather than the number left on the board after Undo, because those two can be very different.
Or play all 12 in one sitting
This page is the towers game on its own, practice only.
The full run is the rehearsal. All 12 back to back in the order the real
assessment most commonly uses them, timed, one attempt each, and no feedback until the end.
About 35 minutes, and nothing is saved, so it needs one sitting.
Answered straight, including the parts people would rather hear differently.
Nine is our choice, not an official figure. Pymetrics does not publish its puzzles. We picked it because the one published worked example of this game solves in nine, and because nine happens to be the most common difficulty in the puzzle's own maths: of the 2,520 possible boards, more sit exactly nine moves from a finished tower than any other distance. So it is both the documented example and the typical case. Treat the real thing as being somewhere in that region rather than exactly nine.
You can, and it is not. This is the Tower of London, a different puzzle that gets confused with Hanoi constantly, including by several preparation sites. In Hanoi the discs are different sizes and a larger one may never sit on a smaller one. Here they are different colours and there is no such rule. The arithmetic is what settles it: five discs under Hanoi rules need thirty-one moves at minimum, and the published example of this game solves in nine.
Longer than feels comfortable. Every source describing this game names the pause before the first move as one of the two things being recorded, and the puzzle is built so that nine moves cannot be found by feel. Twenty to thirty seconds of planning is commonly suggested and it still leaves ninety seconds to execute, which is far more than the moves take. The failure mode is not thinking too long, it is starting too early and spending the time twice.
On the board, no. The step counter goes back down, which is how the real game behaves. On this page the result also counts every move you actually made and never gives one back, and it shows you both numbers. That is deliberate. A board that reads nine steps after forty moves and thirty-one undos is a search, not a plan, and a result that only reported the first number would be flattering you rather than telling you anything.
The run ends and you are told how many moves the board was still short. That is a real outcome rather than a failed attempt. Running out on this game usually means the planning happened while the discs were already moving, which is exactly the pattern the game exists to separate from the other one.
Yes, and that is the shape of the real game as best it is described: one arrangement, two minutes. It does mean a single run is a single measurement, so do not read too much into one result in either direction. Play again and you get a new puzzle, never the same one twice, because a repeat would be measuring what you remember instead of what you plan.
So the game is playable if you cannot separate the colours. The whole content of this puzzle is which colour goes where, which makes colour alone a bad way to carry it. The letters make the colours redundant rather than essential. We do not know whether the real discs are labelled, so treat this as our addition.
Pymetrics and Harver are trademarks of their respective owners and are not affiliated with
OpenThinkr. Practice results are for interest and self-reflection, not assessment.
