Sheep Shift tips: herd the flock at par

Clearing a field is the easy part. Clearing it at par, in the fewest swipes possible, is where Sheep Shift gets interesting. These habits help on every field. New to the game? Start with how to play Sheep Shift.

1. Plan the first swipe before you touch anything

On the harder fields most opening swipes are traps. Some make par impossible, and a few make the field impossible within your budget. Look at where each sheep would stop for all four directions before you commit. Nothing is timed, so a long look is free.

2. Use rocks and fences as brakes

A sheep only stops when something stops it. The fence, a rock or a sheep that has already stopped are your brakes. If a sheep needs to end up in the middle of the field, find the thing it can stop against first, then work out the swipe that sends it there.

3. Every swipe moves everyone

The sheep you are not thinking about move too. Before a swipe, check where the other sheep end up: next to a hole, beside the wolf or in a spot that blocks the pen. Sometimes the best swipe for one sheep is the one that parks another out of the way.

4. Stack sheep on purpose

A sheep that stops becomes a wall for the next one in line. Two sheep in the same row will end up side by side against the fence. That is often how you get a second sheep to stop exactly one cell short of where the first one did.

5. Black sheep go last

A black sheep treats the pen as a rock until every white sheep is in. Park it somewhere safe early, pen the white sheep, then bring it home. A black sheep that keeps sliding past the pen is telling you the order is wrong.

6. Keep a gap from the wolf

The wolf moves after you, one step at a time, toward the nearest sheep. A sheep two cells away is already in danger, because your next swipe might leave it one cell away. Slide sheep away from the wolf early, and use rocks and hedges the wolf cannot cross.

7. Retry is free, so use it

There is no undo, but a retry costs nothing except a mark on your result. If your first swipe went wrong, retry at once rather than spending the rest of the budget on a field you can no longer clear at par.

8. Count backward from the pen

Find the last swipe: which sheep can slide into the pen, from where. Then ask how that sheep gets to that spot. Two or three steps of this usually reveal the whole plan.

Put it to work on today's fields, or go back to how to play Sheep Shift. Sheep Shift is made by One Thumb Games.