Tilt Maze and Hexahedral: winning with moves, not reflexes
StrategyJuly 3, 20266 min readBy Lamine Diouf, Founder of Feud
Astray and Road Hopper reward execution — clean inputs under momentum. Feud's other two games are different animals. Tilt Maze and Hexahedral are puzzle games: the clock is still running, but the fastest players are not the ones with the quickest hands. They are the ones who waste the fewest moves. Having built both into the platform, I can tell you the times at the top of these boards are won in the planning, not the scramble.
One skill, two games: move efficiency
In a reflex game, time is lost in fumbled inputs. In a puzzle game, time is lost in wasted moves — moves that have to be undone, or that never advanced the position at all. Both Tilt Maze and Hexahedral give you an effectively unlimited move rate; what they punish is churn. The core competitive habit for both is the same: pause, read the position, commit to a line, execute it crisply. Three seconds of reading that saves six moves is always a winning trade.
Tilt Maze: every tilt moves every ball
Tilt Maze's defining rule is that you never move one ball — a tilt slides every ball on the board simultaneously until each hits a wall. Beginners fight this: they pick a favorite ball, steer it home, and discover their other balls have scattered into awful positions. Strong players think in whole-board states: not 'where does this tilt send my lead ball' but 'what does the entire board look like after this tilt.'
- Use walls as brakes. A ball only stops when it hits something, so the wall layout is your steering — pick tilts whose stopping points improve several balls at once.
- Park balls deliberately. A ball resting in a pocket where the next tilt cannot disturb it is a solved sub-problem; reduce the puzzle one ball at a time.
- Watch for free progress: the best tilts advance two or three balls toward the center while parking another. Those are the moves that separate a clean solve from a churned one.
Like Astray, Tilt Maze's eight levels are generated from fixed per-level seeds — I set it up so every player solves the identical boards, with later levels growing larger and adding balls. That means a solution you work out is permanent knowledge. If you find an eight-tilt line for a board tonight, it is still the board — and still your line — on every future attempt.
Hexahedral: plan backward from the goal
Hexahedral asks you to press 3D blocks flat across a grid in the fewest moves, and it is the purest planning game in the library. The forward-looking approach — press something and see what happens — burns moves and time. The winning approach runs the puzzle in reverse: look at the final flattened state, ask which block must be pressed last, and walk backward to the move that must come first. Reverse-reading prunes the options dramatically, because while many moves are possible at each step, very few lead to positions the ending can be reached from.
On the clock, this means the strongest Hexahedral runs look strange: a long, still pause at the start, then a burst of confident presses. Do not let the running timer bait you into moving early. The pause is where the run is won.
Practicing puzzles for a feud
- Use test-play for the reading phase. Work out lines with nothing recorded, then switch to recorded attempts to execute them.
- Drill the execution separately. Once you know the line, the remaining time is pure input crispness — practice the sequence until it flows without checking.
- Bank a safe solve early in the feud, then optimize. A recorded clean solve puts you on the board; refinement passes shave the seconds that win it.
- Remember only your best valid time counts — an experimental line that collapses costs you nothing but the attempt.
If you are choosing your first feud and reflex games are not your strength, these two are your home ground. Read the full game guides for the controls and scoring details, find a feud using either game on the hub, and put a plan on the board.