Plank Cut
A woodshop cutting puzzle: buy stock planks and cut a customer's order of board lengths from them for as little money as possible. Every saw cut eats a little wood, so pieces that add up on paper may not fit. 18 orders.
Play nowHow to play
Controls
TapDrag- Tap a plank in the rack on the left to buy it onto the bench; its price is added to what you have spent.
- Drag pieces from the order tray onto a plank, or tap a piece and then a plank.
- Pieces are cut from the left, and every cut takes the saw's width (shown under the rack), so a plank holds its pieces only if their lengths plus the cuts between them fit.
- Tap a piece on a plank to put it back; tap the X beside an empty plank to return it.
- Place every piece to fill the order.
- Three stars for matching the best possible cost.
About the game
Plank Cut is a calm workshop puzzle about the oldest problem in carpentry: cutting what you need from what you can buy. A customer wants a stack of boards in assorted lengths. The timber yard sells planks in a few standard sizes, each with its own price, and you buy whichever planks you like, lay them on the bench and decide which pieces come out of which plank. Fill the whole order and the bill is what you spent.
Two things make it trickier than adding up numbers. First, the saw has width: every cut turns a few centimetres into sawdust, so a 240 cm plank cannot hold two 120 cm boards, and a plank full of short pieces loses far more to cuts than one with two long ones. Second, the cheapest plank per centimetre is not always the right one; sometimes a short plank finishes the job for less than a long one that would leave a big offcut. Each order was checked with an exact search to find the lowest possible cost, and from the fourth order on, the obvious habit of filling the longest planks first with the longest boards always costs more than the best answer. Leftover lengths are shown on every plank, and a ghost turns red before you drop a piece that will not fit.
Free to play in your browser. No download, no sign-up. Best on a computer, or a phone held sideways. Your progress is saved on this device.