How to Play Fit It: The Daily Shape Packing Puzzle

Fit It is a packing puzzle. A box sits in the middle of the screen and a tray of loose objects sits beside it: a sofa, a piano, a stack of moving boxes, a corner desk. Every one of them has to end up inside the box, turned whichever way it needs to go, with no overlaps and nothing hanging over an edge.

The catch is that the pieces are awkward. A sofa is a U, a corner desk is an L, and an L only ever fits where another piece has already left a matching notch. That is what turns a simple looking tray into a real puzzle: the order you pack in matters as much as where each piece goes.

Every board is guaranteed to fit. The puzzle is built backwards, by packing an empty box and then tipping the pieces back out, so the arrangement you are looking for is one that was physically laid down before you ever saw the board. You will never be handed something that cannot be done.

Your score is time. A per board estimate is worked out from the piece count, how awkward the shapes are and how full the box has to get, and gold, silver and bronze are set at one and a half, two and three times that estimate.

How to play Fit It

1. Choose how many of you are playing, from one to eight. That is the only difficulty setting: a solo box holds five pieces and each extra player adds two more, up to sixteen.
2. Choose Daily for the box everybody of that team size gets today, or Quick Game for a freshly packed box any time you like.
3. Drag a piece from the tray into the box. It follows your pointer and a green outline shows exactly which squares it will land on, so you can line it up before you let go.
4. Rotate a piece with the Rotate piece button. Pick it up first, in the tray or on the board, and each press steps it to its next distinct orientation. A square only has one, so it will tell you rather than pretending to spin.
5. A drop that would hang over an edge or land on another piece is refused and the piece stays where it was, so nothing is ever lost to a fumbled drag. Drag a piece back out of the box to return it to the tray.
6. The clock stops the moment the last piece goes in. There is no time limit, so a slow run is a run without a medal rather than a loss.
7. To pack with other people, choose Play Together instead of Play Solo. Start a room, share the link or the six character code, and everybody from two to eight players works the same box at the same time with one shared clock and one shared medal.

Strategy and tips

• Pack the biggest and most awkward pieces first. A piano or a sofa has very few places it can go once the box is half full, whereas a single stool fits almost anywhere, so spending your empty space on the fussy pieces costs you nothing later.
• Work from the corners inwards. Corners constrain a piece on two sides at once, which is exactly what an L shape wants, and leaving them until last tends to leave holes nothing can reach.
• Turn a piece before you drag it, not while you are holding it. The tray is the cheapest place to try all four orientations, and a piece dropped in the wrong orientation has to come back out anyway.
• The box is never completely full. Every board is built with some slack left over, so a hole at the end is normal, and it is the room you need to manoeuvre rather than a mistake.
• If you get stuck, empty the box rather than shuffling. Two or three pieces moved at random rarely fixes a bad opening, and a fresh start with the big pieces placed first is usually quicker than untangling one.
• Watch the pace readout rather than the clock. It names the medal you are still on course for, so you know whether to keep hunting for the tidy answer or just get everything in.

What makes Fit It different

It cannot be impossible. Deciding whether a bag of shapes fits a box is a genuinely hard question in general, so this game never asks it: each board is generated by packing it first and handing you the pieces afterwards. Nothing in the game will ever tell you a board cannot be done, because none of them can be.

Team size is the only difficulty knob, and it changes the daily as well as a quick game. Two people and six people get different boxes on the same day, because sharing one board would mean whoever asked first decided the difficulty for everybody.

The answer unlocks on a timer rather than on request. There is no hint button while a medal is still on the table. Once you pass five times the estimate, by which point every medal has already gone, a button appears that draws the arrangement the box was built from.

The medals are absolute times, not a curve against other players. Gold on a big box is a longer clock than gold on a small one, because the estimate is worked out per board, so you are racing the box in front of you rather than a leaderboard.

Play Together is genuinely cooperative rather than a race. Every other multiplayer game here ranks people against each other; this one has no leaderboard at all, because the box is either packed or it is not. The end screen lists who placed what to celebrate the run, not to sort anybody.

Two people reaching for the same piece at the same moment is a real event rather than a race the network decides. If two grabs land within a fraction of a second of each other, neither player gets the piece: it flashes red for both of them, rests for a moment and then goes back on the table. Whoever has the faster connection gains nothing.

The share card is deliberately just a score bar. In a packing puzzle the answer is a picture, so any grid of squares that mirrored the board would be the solution, and the card carries a time and a medal instead.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Free daily puzzle games to play in your browser: A shortlist by puzzle type - word, logic, colour, memory - of dailies that take five minutes and are the same for everyone.
• Free browser games to play with your team, no signup: Games that start in one click, work on a call, and never ask anybody to make an account.