There are books that show step by step how to do it, but I always thought that was cheating. I was born in 1971, so I was the perfect age when the Rubik’s Cube first came out, and so, I just played with it until I figured out how to solve it. But I can’t really put it down into a step by step, because I never really wanted to make it into a process, that just takes the fun out of it for me. I instead broke it down into a series of steps. First off, see if you can solve one side, if you can do that, then see if you can solve one side so that if you look at the entire cubes (and not just the side that you solved), meaning look at each of the 4 sides bordering the solved side, see if you can get the cubes in the right place. By that I mean, let’s say you have 6 sides, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and white, and you solve the red side. Now let’s say orange is opposite of red, so you should have one side where the middle piece is green, one where it’s blue, one where it’s yellow and one where it’s white. The top will have a red middle piece (as well as all other 8 pieces being red), and the underside will have an orange middle piece. What you want is each of those 4 other sides (green, blue, yellow and white), to have the 3 top pieces the same color as the middle. So, in other words, if you’re looking at the cube from the top, you see red…set the cube on a table, so the red side is face up, and then look at the 4 sides. If you can solve it so the top is done, AND the side with the blue middle piece also has the top left, top middle and top right pieces blue, same thing on the green side, the yellow side and the white side…if you can do that, I believe you can solve the cube. Basically the terminology they use is to have the pieces aligned AND oriented properly.
You have to think of the cube not so much as six sides, but as 8 corners and 12 side pieces around something that looks a lot like a jack….6 middle pieces around a core. Really what I did was to break it down into first solving the corners and then looking at the rest. In other words, pick one side to work on, let’s say it’s the red side. Try to get the side looking like an X, so each of the 4 corners is red, and then look at the sides. Are there 4 x’s, one on each of the sides. If not, you have to practice swapping corners, if you can move corner a to corner b, and b back to where corner a was, you can practice swapping them around. What I do is solve the top, solve the bottom, keep flipping it up and down, back and forth until all 8 pieces are in place. When I do this, all 6 sides have X’s on them.
After that, you can basically move pieces around without actually disturbing the corners. If you don’t move the edges around, but only move the cubes along the middle path (if you have one you might be able to see what I’m talking about). There is a way, and it’s trial and error to figure it out to do the next thing I like to do, which is to make a strip around the middle. Basically your top and bottom look like X’s and each side looks like a big H. All that’s not solved at this point is the 4 center edge cubes on the top and bottom.
Then you can actually by just flipping this up and down, solve the red side, and what you have then is basically the orange side has 4 cubes out of place. You then solve the orange side, which you can do again without messing up that middle strip. You may mess up the red side, but then resolve red and keep flipping and solving until you have solved the whole thing. Basically you have to kind of think about what you’re doing at every step. It’s kind of confusing to describe using just words with no visuals, but if you can get part of it solved, and then solve another part without disturbing what you’ve already solved, that’s how you get the whole thing eventually. Just remember really it’s a matter of getting 20 cubes in the right position in the right orientations….solve the first 8 corners, then the other 12 sides you do in groups of 4…each time it limits your moves that you can make without disturbing the rest, but if you can as I said figure out how to solve one side with the proper side orientations. Each time you accomplish something (like the x’s) then experiment moving the cube around to see what moves you can and can’t make without disturbing what you’ve solved already.
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