How to Play Torque

Torque is a top-down workbench puzzle where your job is simple to state but surprisingly hard to master: remove every bolt from a stack of layered metal plates. The catch is dependency. Plates sit on top of one another, and a bolt is only accessible — only tappable — when no higher plate covers it. So you must think two or three moves ahead: which plate do I need to free first, and what colour bolts will that unleash?

Bolts come in four colours — brass, copper, silver, and iron — and each colour feeds into its own holder column on the right side of the workbench. Holders have a hard capacity limit that shrinks as the difficulty rises: five slots on Easy, four on Medium and Hard, three on Expert. The moment you attempt to remove a bolt whose holder is already full, the puzzle ends. That constraint is the engine of the game. It forces you to balance your colour draw across every move, never draining one colour so fast that its holder overflows before the plates holding the others are freed.

Each puzzle is a directed graph in disguise. Plates are nodes; a plate blocks another when it lies on top of it. Bolts are the edges you cut. Cut all the edges on a plate and it slides free. The art of Torque is reading that graph quickly — spotting the bottleneck colour, finding the order that keeps every holder under capacity all the way to the last plate.

Tips and Strategy

Count your bolts before your first tap. Before touching anything, scan the whole board. Count how many brass, copper, silver, and iron bolts are visible (accessible now) versus locked under other plates. If one colour has many locked bolts you cannot reach until late in the puzzle, resist spending its holder slots early — you will need room when those bolts finally become accessible.

Find your critical path. Look for the plate that, once freed, unlocks the most bolts. That is usually the plate you want to target early. Free it and you gain options; neglect it and you might paint yourself into a corner where all remaining accessible bolts are the same colour, and that colour's holder is already full.

Watch for chain reactions. Removing a plate often exposes an entirely new set of bolts in one step. If those newly accessible bolts are all the same colour, you need enough room in that holder to absorb them. A chain reaction that floods one colour is the most common cause of an Expert-level game over.

Star hunting. The three-star rating requires that your minimum holder headroom never dips below two spare slots across the entire run. That is harder than it sounds on Hard and Expert — it means you can never get greedy. Aim to keep every holder at half-capacity or below at all times, spreading your taps evenly across colours rather than clearing one plate completely before moving to the next.