Skewb Tutorial

Here's the Skewb, at front and center, supported in the background by (at left) the Diamond Skewb and the Skewb Ultimate, and (at right) some Skewb-adjacent puzzles, called the Dino Cube, Ivy Cube and Redi Cube. I'm not a great expert at this puzzle, but I've been wanting to do this tutorial partly to help myself improve on it. And also, so I can move on to cover the other puzzles in the picture.

The Skewb has the same general shape and color scheme as the original Rubik's Cube, with white and yellow on opposite sides, green opposite blue, orange opposite red, and the mnemonic BOGR applying to the last four colors as you rotate the cube in ascending order with white at left and yellow at right. Keeping in mind which colors go opposite each other becomes important later on.

What does "Skewb" mean? Well, etymologically, I guess it's a clever mash-up of the words "skew" and "cube." Practically – and I'm speculating here, based on my experience with three different puzzles in the Skewb line – my impression is that they're take-offs on the face-turning puzzles of the same shape, only cut to turn diagonally. Another characteristic of Skewbs, I find, is that any move turns half of the puzzle. Moving a piece to where you want it may take some extra thought, planning and practice to develop your technique. And patterns like the "sledgehammer algorithm" (variations on "down-down-up-up" alternating from right to left) play a significant role in solving them.

The first difficulty to overcome in playing with the Skewb is to understand the scramble notation. I've searched online and found two or three different notation systems for scrambling the Skewb. The one on this puzzle scrambler is different from all of them.

The first umpteen times I solved the Skewb, I had to look at every single step of the scramble to figure out what I was supposed to do, and I couldn't make heads or tails of what the symbols stood for. I finally figured it out after reading up on the other scramble patterns and applying that knowledge to the present scrambler.

For scrambling purposes, I think it helps to look at the cube with the front right edge facing forward. (Always start with green at front and white up.) Then think of the corner I'm pointing at in this picture as being a fixed corner that all your scramble moves will leave untouched.

An L or L' move will rotate around the corner I'm pointing at here. In other words, it will move the left, front and down sides either clockwise or counterclockwise (both shown).

L:

L':

An R or R' move will rotate around the corner I'm pointing at here. So, it will turn the back, right and down sides either clockwise or counterclockwise (both shown).

R:

R':

A U or U' move will twist around the corner I'm pointing at here. So, it will turn the up, left and back sides.

U:

U':

A B or B' move will move the corner that I'm attempting to point at below, though you can't actually see it; it's the down/left/back corner (directly below the U/U' corner) and moves those three sides.

B:

B':

Oy vay, right? So here's what the above scramble pattern looks like when completed. And believe me, I executed this exact scramble a half-dozen times for the making of this tutorial, checking my work against the step-by-step images the first couple times to make sure I understood what I was doing. It's nice to finally have a grasp on this.

Now to the solve. STEP 1: Solve the white side. This is the completely intuitive part of solving the Skewb and may be the hardest part, until you've practiced enough to grasp how the puzzle moves. But let's say you want to put this red-white edge with the white center. A good position to work from is with white on top and the white side of the corner in question on the bottom layer, facing sideways. Then turn the sides that pivot around the adjacent, bottom corner (in this case, the one pointing into the palm of my hand).

Here's another blue-white corner that I want to dial in next to the previous corner, which also had blue on one side. You want the side colors to match. So if you can, put this corner in the lower layer, with the white side facing sideways and the "pivot" corner under the slot where you want the piece to go; then twist.

Problem: This red, green and white corner is in the top layer, oriented incorrectly. Pivot around the corner below it (here blue-orange) to put it in the bottom layer.

New problem: If you pivot that corner to the top from there, its green side will end up next to the orange corner at top left; i.e. that's not where this bottom corner goes. So, pivot around the corner in question, then dial it into place around the adjacent bottom corner on the other side.

To solve the fourth white corner, you often have to break one of the solved corners to rotate the last unsolved corner into position. But once you put that corner into its slot, you should be able to dial the temporarily broken one back in with one simple move. However, I didn't shoot an example picture of this; my fourth-corner solve was straightforward.

STEP 2: Solve the yellow corners. Put the solved white side at the bottom. Now look for yellow "headlights": i.e. two adjacent yellow corners facing sidewise on the same side. In my example solve, I was lucky enough to have them.

If you don't, put any single, sideways-facing yellow corner at right and do the algorithm I'm about to demonstrate (a "down-down-up-up," don'tcha know). If you do have headlights, rotate the whole cube so they face to the right:

Then do this "down-down-up-up" pattern, pivoting around the corners at the top front right and top front left, in alternation. (I'm not even sure what the notation would be for that, given the scramble notation explained above.) Here are these moves illustrated:

STEP 3: Solve the yellow center. The maneuver above actually solved the whole yellow side in my example, but that isn't a given. Suppose (as usually happens) you've only put the yellow corners on top, like so:

Put the side with the yellow center at back (still with the yellow corners up) and do the same down-down-up-up; then rotate the cube 180 degrees, from back to front (that's a horizontal y2 move, in either the U or U' direction), and repeat the down-down-up-up on that side. I've shown it to you once, which I hope was enough. Here's the result:

STEP 4: Solve one of the remaining sides. Once the yellow side is done, study the middle layers between yellow and white.

Either three or four of them may be unsolved at this point; ideally three. If all four non-yellow/white sides are unsolved, simply put yellow at left, any unsolved side at front and repeat the Step 3 algorithm of down-down-up-up / y2 / down-down-up-up. Again, I was super-fortunate in my example solve; the red side was already solved. So, I could move on to ...

STEP 5: Solve the last three sides. Find a side where the corners and centers belong on opposite sides. (See? I told you that would be important.) For example, this blue center belongs opposite to these green corners.

Holding the yellow side to the left, the solved side (in this case red) facing down, and the opposite-colors side at front (as above), complete the Step 3 algorithm again (down-down-up-up / y2 / down-down-up-up). Result:

Once you've taken to heart the Skewb's bizarre scramble notation and which corners you're supposed to pivot around in all these "down-down-up-up" moves, the problem basically reduces to which sides should be facing what directions at each step. That's white up for Step 1; white down and yellow headlights to the right for Step 2; white down and yellow center at back for Step 3; yellow to the left at Step 4; and yellow to the left, a solved side down and opposite colors at front for Step 5. If you can absorb that, the Skewb is your oyster. And with very little adjustment, the Skewb Diamond and Skewb Ultimate could be as well. Seriously, the hardest thing about the Skewb is picking it up without inadvertently scrambling it (a real problem). But solving it again is no biggie.