Number Forge

About Number Forge – Daily Arithmetic Puzzle

Number Forge gives you six number tiles and a three-digit target, and asks you to build one out of the other. You write an expression using plus, minus, times, divide and brackets; each tile may be used at most once, and some of them are decoys you will not need at all.

The constraint that turns this from arithmetic into a puzzle is that every intermediate value must stay a positive whole number. No negatives, no fractions, no working backwards through a division that does not come out exactly. That rules out most of the obvious routes to a target and is why an expression that looks right on paper is often rejected — the order you combine the tiles in matters as much as which ones you pick.

Every day's target is constructed by folding a random expression over the drawn tiles and taking its value, so a solution is guaranteed to exist before the puzzle is ever published. Get it exactly and you win; the feedback tells you how close a miss was. A new set of tiles arrives at midnight Budapest time, and past days stay playable in the archive.

How to play Number Forge

Reach the target using the six tiles, in 5 attempts.

1. Combine tiles with + − × ÷ and brackets.
2. Each tile may be used at most once, and some are not needed.
3. Every step must stay a positive whole number.