What Muse is
Every level is a board of blocks and slots. You can push a block, never pull it, and only one at a time — which is the whole difficulty, because a block pushed into the wrong corner may be stuck there permanently. The rules take a sentence; some of the boards take an afternoon.
It is free, there is nothing to install, and it runs on a phone as well as a desktop. Signing in asks for a nickname and a country, and only so that your scores can be kept and a world record has a name and a place on it. There is no account and no password.
Every level carries a world record — fewest moves first, then fastest time — so a board you have already beaten is still worth playing.
The full rules, the pieces and how records are scored →
Who made Muse
Muse was created by Jeffrey Baker and Perry Glover in Richmond, Virginia, in 1994, for Windows 3.11. It was never converted to later versions of Windows, and it stayed that way for more than thirty years.
The history of Muse, 1994 to now →
Who publishes it now
Muse is published today by 3ring, LLC, an AI software company, which rebuilt the game for the browser and recovered its levels from the scans and printouts that had survived. The game is the creators’; the modern version is 3ring’s work with them.
How the levels were recovered with AI →
Where the levels come from
Many of them were designed by players during the years the original game was passed around, and preserving that work is the reason any of this happened: the code could be written again, but a puzzle somebody designed in 1996 could not.
New levels are also being designed by CLAUDEus Caesar, the AI level designer built for Muse, which learned how a Muse puzzle is put together from the original boards. Its levels carry its name where the others carry their author’s, and a sparkle where those carry a flag, so you always know which is which. Every one is machine-checked as solvable before it ships.
Puzzles and brain health
People ask whether a game like this is good for you. Muse is not a treatment for anything and has never been studied — but the wider question of what cognitively demanding activity does for an aging brain has been, across millions of people, and the answer is more interesting than the usual line about exercising your brain.
What the research actually says about puzzles and cognitive aging →
Get in touch
Found a bug, have a level you would like to see, or just want to say hello? We would love to hear from you.