Instructions

 
Move all red, yellow, and blue pieces to the correct face. To move a piece, click on the piece. If there is an empty spot next to it, the piece will move to the empty spot. You can also jump pieces to an empty spot. When all pieces are on the correct face, you win!

Sloyd is a Swedish word that represents the labor it takes to become skilled in a trade. The proper way spell "sloyd" in Swedish is actually "slöjd"; something I learned from a friend on the net.

Ron van Bruchem has written a Java™ applet to solve the Sloyd^3 cube. The way it works is, first, you choose to limit the depth of your search (45 is the mathematical limit). Then, press solve. It will attempt to find a solution and, when it does, it will present it to you.

Ivan Kirigin has created some code to solve Sloyd which, with a little tweaking, can be the basis for your own Sloyd^3 solver.

Check out Gil Cohen's strategy guide!

This strategy assumes that the greedy approach returns the best results.

1. Never move a soldier to a place where it won't get him closer to his target (meaning don't go backwards or left or right, if forward is the face he is supposed to go to).

2. At every step, do the best move you can do, meaning try to find the one soldier that can move forward as much as possible. Unless, and this important, you get into a situation where you have 2 yellows. For example, stack the blue soldier in the last column.

1 2 3
Y B B
B Y B
R B Y

The third column is bad, because you have no way to get the yellow out unless you move one of the blues, but they are in the best location and moving it would interfere with rule number 1 - don't move someone backwards.

A situation like this below is okay:

1 2 3
Y B Y
B B Y
B Y B

At column 2 you have 2 blues stacking the yellow one, but that is okay because they can go forward to column 3 [actually, in every single play that the outcome is good (less then 48, say) I get this situation at least once.]