https://corruo.com

I’ve been working on a daily strategy game and I can’t really judge its upper limit.

The idea is simple:

9×9 board

numbers 1–9 (each appears 9 times)

you can swap any two tiles

3+ in a row/column clears

no gravity

goal is to clear the whole board in as few swaps as possible.

Everyone plays the same board each day. From the people I’ve tested (including myself), it’s been genuinely competitive.There’s a real sense of optimization and trying to squeeze out better solutions

Typical results so far:

average: \~30 swaps

better players: \~26–28

best so far: 24 swaps (all depending on current daily board)

Where I’m stuck is this:

I don’t have the skill level to evaluate how far this can actually go. I don’t know whether stronger players would: see deeper setups, plan multiple moves ahead consistently find significantly better solutions or if the puzzle naturally converges into similar outcomes.That’s why I’m asking here.

Chess players tend to be exceptionally strong at:

pattern recognition

long-term planning

optimization under constraints

This puzzle is essentially an optimization problem, so I feel like people with that mindset would see things I simply can’t. If anyone here is willing to give it a serious try, I would genuinely appreciate it. 

More than anything, I’m trying to understand: 

does this have a meaningful ceiling?

or am I overestimating what’s possible?

Even a single strong perspective would help me a lot.

I don’t have the skill to evaluate the ceiling of my game — would really appreciate insight from strong chess players