SolveMe Mobiles

Imagine a hanging sculpture made with shapes, strings, and beams. The beams and strings are weightless, but the shapes have weight. Sometimes the total weight of the mobile is shown at the top (like the 12 in this puzzle); sometimes there are other clues. Your goal is to figure out the weight that the shapes must be to make the mobile balance.

Here, since the total weight is 12, the weight at each end of the top beam must be 6, so the weight of the hexagon is 6. The total weight of the smaller beam is also 6, so the weight of each circle must be 3.
Some mobile puzzles have a weight hanging on the string above or below a beam like the heart in this puzzle below. These can be tricky to solve!

For example here, the player must find the weight of the right half of the puzzle (22) and then subtract the weight of the two trapezoids (12 total) in order to find the weight of the heart.

Puzzle Menu

The Puzzle Menu has 4 tabs:

"SolveMe Puzzles" includes three levels of built-in puzzles: Explorer, Puzzler, and Master.
"SolveMe Community" includes all of the puzzles created by SolveMe players who have shared their puzzles with the community.
"My Saved Puzzles" is a list of all of the puzzles you have built and saved.
"My Favorites" is a list of all of the puzzles you have "liked."

Each puzzle has a "like" button that turns blue when you click it to "like" the puzzle. A star will appear when you have solved the puzzle (shown right).

To remove a puzzle from your "My Favorites" list, click the "like" button again. To delete one of your "My Saved Puzzles," click and hold one of the puzzles, and then let go and click the red "x". When you are finished deleting puzzles, click "Finished Deleting".

Tools

There is a toolbar at the bottom of the Play screen.

Each of the four tools on the left, when you select it, will explain what options you have. In the Menu, for example, you can choose to "edit a copy" of the puzzle or to "start over" with a fresh copy of the mobile.

You can use the pencil tool (in various colors!) to keep track of what you discover as you work on the puzzle. You also have an eraser and undo and redo buttons. When you are done using the pencil or eraser, click the hand tool to create and change equations.

Creating Equations

If grab a beam and drag it off the mobile, you can create an equation, shown here to the right of the mobile. The equation describes the balance shown by that beam. In this example, the top beam tells us that a hexagon and a moon together weigh the same as two diamonds, and the equation says the same thing. You can delete equations by dragging them to the trash can, which will appear in the lower right.

If the mobile's total weight is given, you can also create an equation by dragging off that total weight (shown below).

If weights have been given or entered for every shape on a string (and the "Show Numbers in Mobile" setting is on), you can also create an equation by dragging off the total weight for that string.

Subtraction

You can remove identical objects from both sides of an equation by dragging them off (subtracting equal objects from both sides). Here, the player drags off one triangle, and the app removes it from each side.

Division

If all the coefficients in an equation ("3" and "6" in this example) have a common factor, then you can divide them all by that factor and get a new equation that is still true (balanced). Tap the coefficient to show the prime factors, and then drag off any common factors.

Substitution

You can use an equation to help you solve a mobile. In this example, we dragged the lower beam to get the equation

. If we drag that equation back onto the hexagons on the mobile, we can substitute two circles for each hexagon in the long string. Then, we can see that seven yellow circles weigh half of 42.