What you are actually holding

A cube looks like twenty-six little cubes glued into a big one. It is not. Take one apart and you find a six-armed spindle in the middle, with the pieces clipped onto it. That single fact explains almost everything about how solving works.

Three kinds of piece

Look at any face. The centre has one sticker, the four edges have two each, and the four corners have three each. There are six centres, twelve edges and eight corners: twenty moving pieces in total, not twenty-six.

This is why "the white side" is never ambiguous, and it is why a piece can only ever go to one place. The green-white edge belongs between the green centre and the white centre. There is exactly one such gap on the whole cube.

A piece keeps its colours

A corner with white, green and red on it will always have white, green and red on it. You cannot make a piece into a different piece; you can only move it and turn it. That means solving is a sorting problem, not a painting problem — and it means that if you ever see a corner with two whites, someone has taken your cube apart and put it back together wrong.

How turns are written

Every instruction on this site is written in the standard notation. It takes about two minutes to learn and it is worth doing now, properly, because every algorithm you meet from here on assumes it.

• U — turn the up face a quarter turn clockwise, looking down at it
• D — the down face, clockwise as seen from below
• R, L — the right and left faces, clockwise as seen from that side
• F, B — the front and back faces, clockwise as seen from that side
• A ' after the letter means anticlockwise instead: R' undoes R
• A 2 means half a turn: R2 is the same either way round

The plan

You will solve the cube in layers, bottom to top. First a cross on the bottom, then the bottom corners, then the middle layer, then the top. Each step leaves the previous ones intact — that is the whole trick, and it is why the algorithms look as convoluted as they do.