What is Aura Align
Aura Align is a small machine that refuses to be turned one piece at a time. Three rings sit around a glowing core, each cut into eight coloured blocks, and three dashed boxes wait at the top of the board. The work is simple to state and awkward to do: put a cyan block in each of those boxes at the same time. Drag any ring and it turns, snapping to eighths of a circle — but it never turns alone.
The rings are geared to one another. Turning the inner ring drives the middle ring the opposite way. Turning the middle ring drives both the inner and the outer rings backwards. Turning the outer ring drives the middle one. So the ring you have just fixed is exactly the ring the next turn is going to break, and the puzzle is really about the order of the turns rather than any single turn. Two modes share the same machine: an endless ladder that scrambles a little further with every level, and one daily board that is the same for everyone in the world.
How to play
- Drag anywhere on a ring to turn it — with the mouse on a computer, with a finger on a phone. Let go and it snaps to the nearest eighth of a circle. Nothing happens until you let go, so you can drag back and forth while you think without spending a move.
- The gearing is the whole game: inner turns middle the other way; middle turns inner and outer the other way; outer turns middle the other way. A move counts once, no matter how many rings it dragged with it.
- You win when all three cyan blocks are in the dashed boxes at twelve o'clock at the same moment; a white beam shoots up and the board pays out. You lose when the move counter runs out — the limit is the scramble depth plus five, so there is room for five wrong guesses and no more.
- The score is the base for the level (200 per level in Endless, a flat 1000 in the Daily), plus up to 300 for speed — ten points come off per second — plus fifty points for every move you did not spend. Endless keeps adding to the same total until you run out of moves.
Strategies that work
- Solve it backwards from the outer ring. The outer ring is only ever disturbed by the middle one, so once the outer block is home you have exactly one ring left that can spoil it — and you will know when you are about to.
- A whole ring is eight blocks, so turning one ring eight times in the same direction brings it back to where it started while the neighbours end up somewhere new. That is a legal way to move a neighbour without changing the ring you are dragging.
- The measured solutions of the endless ladder run around two to three moves and the allowance is the scramble plus five, so the counter is generous early on. Do not spend that slack on random dragging: from level 10 or so the scramble is deep enough that five wasted moves is exactly the margin you needed.
- Speed pays only 300 points at most and it drops ten a second, so after half a minute there is nothing left to win by rushing. The move bonus is fifty a move and never expires — thinking is worth more than hurrying.
- The Daily is a single board, always eight scrambles deep, and it locks once you have played it. Do it while you are warm, not as your first board of the day: an endless run or two costs nothing and the daily only counts once.
A little history
The word aura arrived in medicine and physics long before it arrived in fortune-telling: a Greek word for a breeze, borrowed by neurologists in the nineteenth century for the strange light some people see before a migraine. Aura Align keeps the old sense — something that surrounds a core and moves on its own terms. Concentric-ring puzzles are older still: the Chinese rings, the combination locks of the Renaissance, the cipher wheels used by clerks who needed a secret to survive one journey. All of them share the same small cruelty, which is that the pieces are not independent. Move one and you have moved another, and the only way through is to work out which order does the least damage.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a time limit?
No. The clock only shrinks the speed bonus, which is 300 points at most and gone after thirty seconds. Nothing ends the board except running out of moves, so you can sit and look at it for as long as you like.
Why did the ring I just fixed move again?
Because the rings are geared. Every ring you drag turns at least one neighbour the other way. That is the puzzle, not a bug — the trick is to fix the outer ring first, since only one ring can disturb it.
Can I play the Daily more than once?
No. The daily board is the same for everyone in the world and it locks after one attempt, so the ranking compares like with like. Endless is unlimited and never locks.
