Tower of Hanoi

About Tower of Hanoi

Tower of Hanoi is the classic thinking puzzle: move a stack of discs from the first peg to the last, one disc at a time, and never let a bigger disc sit on a smaller one. It looks simple with three discs and becomes a real planning challenge at seven — the shortest possible solution doubles with every disc you add. A brilliant way to discover that a hard problem can be solved by solving a smaller version of itself first.

Tower of Hanoi is one of our puzzles & logic games for kids. This one plays in the iPhone and iPad app rather than in the browser, but 33 of our games are free to play right here — browse the full library to find them. It is also in our logic games for kids and classic games for kids collections.

How to Play

• Tap a peg to lift the disc on top of it.
• Tap another peg to drop the disc there.
• A bigger disc can never go on top of a smaller one.
• Move the whole tower to the peg marked ‘finish here’.

Tips & Tricks

• Think about where the biggest disc needs to go, and clear a path for it first.
• The shortest solution is shown as ‘best possible’ — try to match it.
• Undo is there for experiments; using it costs you nothing.

What Kids Learn

Tower of Hanoi is built to teach. Playing it, children work on:

• Planning several steps ahead
• Breaking a big problem into smaller ones

Tower of Hanoi — Frequently Asked Questions