Learn · Level 1 · step 1 of 8
Read the moves
Every cube method in the world is written in the same six letters. Ten minutes here and you can read all of it.
Hold the cube with the white centre facing up and the green centre facing you, and keep it that way. Each face now has a name: Up, Down, Left, Right, Front, Back.
A letter on its own means: turn that face a quarter-turn clockwise, judged as if you were looking straight at that face. A letter with an apostrophe, said "prime", means anticlockwise. A letter with a 2 means a half-turn. That is the whole language.
The player on the right performs the most famous four moves in cubing, known, honestly, as the sexy move: R U R' U'. Play it, then use the step buttons and match each turn on your own cube. Do the four moves six times in a row and the cube comes back exactly as it started. That round-trip is your first checkpoint: if your cube returns home, you are reading notation correctly.
Every algorithm on this page is checked by simulation before publishing: the position shown plus the moves shown must produce a solved cube. Players: press play, or step through one turn at a time.