Stax rewards two skills: reading the target silhouette before you start dropping, and sequencing your queue so the right piece is available when you need it. The tips below assume you have read the rules.
1. Read the silhouette first
Before you place your first piece, look at the target and count something. Count the lowest row's width. Count the height of the tallest column. Count the holes — any concave pockets that pieces will need to slot into. The biggest mistake new players make is starting to drop before they have any idea where things go.
On Hard, where the silhouette is hidden during play, this is even more important. Use the rough footprint shown in the silhouette panel to guess the overall envelope before pieces start landing.
2. Build the floor before the walls
Stacking puzzles, like brickwork, are easier from the bottom up. Whenever possible, fill the lowest row of the target completely before starting on the second row. Gaps in the floor are very hard to recover from — you usually need an I-piece or a vertical L/J to slip into a one-wide column, and those may not be in your queue at the right time.
3. Save your I-pieces for tight columns
An I-piece is the only shape that can fill a one-wide, four-tall hole in a single drop. If you spot a vertical slot in the target — common on towers and skyline puzzles — make sure you have an I-piece coming before you wall it in. Burning an I-piece on a flat row when you have an O or an L that could do the same job is a classic mistake.
4. Treat S and Z as a pair
S-pieces and Z-pieces leave a stair-step gap unless they are matched. When you see one in the queue, scan ahead for its mirror — if both are coming, you can often place them side by side and cancel each other's jaggedness out. If only one is coming, plan to land it where its uneven edge meets the silhouette's boundary, not in open territory.
5. Rotate first, move second
Rotation is cheap; horizontal travel is expensive (because you can't rotate after hard-dropping). Decide the final orientation of the piece before you start sliding it across the board. This becomes muscle memory after a few puzzles and saves real time on the clock.
6. The undo button is not cheating
You get one undo of your last placed piece. If you hard-drop into a configuration that creates an unrecoverable hole, undo immediately and try a different column. Undo does not reset your timer, so it is almost always worth it.
7. On Hard, memorize the outline
Medium and Hard hide the target during play. The trick is not to memorize the interior squares one by one — it is to memorize the outline. Three or four landmarks ("the left side has a notch on row three, the top is flat for four columns, the right side has a staircase") is enough to reconstruct the whole shape. Treat it like remembering a face, not like memorizing a list.
8. Take the partial win
You only need 100% match with zero overflow to win, but a 95% match with two overflow squares is still a respectable result and still builds your daily habit. If a puzzle is genuinely going wrong, finishing it teaches you more than restarting — the result modal will show you where you overshot, which trains your eye for next time.
9. Play all three difficulties
Easy, Medium, and Hard each train a different skill. Easy is about piece efficiency. Medium is about short-term memory under time pressure. Hard is about spatial reasoning from incomplete information. Players who only play one difficulty plateau much faster than players who rotate through all three.
Practice routines
Three puzzles a day is enough. If you want to drill further, replay the same day's puzzle on a higher difficulty after finishing the lower ones — the silhouette will be different (each difficulty is generated separately) but the muscle memory carries over.
More questions? See the FAQ.