Tangram Tide

You're given a silhouette to fill and a tray of shapes. Select a piece, rotate or reflect it to the orientation you need, then drop it onto empty silhouette cells. Click a placed piece to pick it back up. Every few seconds the tide floods the lowest open row of the silhouette, and flooded cells can no longer be filled, so finish the bottom before the water reaches it. Place every piece to complete the picture.

• Rotate and reflect each piece to make it fit the outline.
• Drop pieces only onto empty silhouette cells.
• The tide floods one bottom row every few seconds, sealing those cells.
• Fit all pieces before the rising water blocks your last spaces.

• Daily (seeded): the same silhouette for everyone, in Easy, Medium, or Hard.
• Practice (random): fresh silhouettes at your chosen difficulty.

• Desktop: click a tray piece, use Rotate and Reflect, then click a cell to drop it; Undo takes back a placement.
• Phone & tablet: tap a piece, tap Rotate/Reflect, then tap an empty cell to place it.

• Fill the bottom rows first, they're the ones the tide will take from you.
• Match a piece's longest edge to the silhouette's boundary to lock in its orientation fast.
• Place awkward, hard-to-fit pieces early while you still have open space to work with.

Tangram Tide blends classic shape-fitting with gentle time pressure, sharpening the spatial reasoning behind geometry and measurement.

• Skills: spatial reasoning, shape composition and decomposition, geometry, problem-solving
• Best for: roughly grades 3–7 (ages 8–13)
• For parents & teachers: hands-on spatial practice that builds geometric intuition.

Filling a silhouette from a tray of shapes, rotating and reflecting as needed, is the tangram — seven pieces, reputedly Chinese and late-18th-century, carried to Europe and America by traders.

Allowing reflection as well as rotation is the original permission.

Reflection matters because it halves the difficulty in a specific way. A piece and its mirror image are different shapes to a solver who cannot flip them; allowing the flip means orientation is fully free, which is the classic tangram's rule and why its puzzles are stated as outlines alone.

Tangram Tide is an original, free browser puzzle that blends classic shape-dissection fitting with a rising-tide time pressure to sharpen spatial reasoning. No install required.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.