Rubik's Cube Trivia
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99 free Rubik's Cube trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Rubik's Cube trivia questions with answers. The Rubik's Cube is the best-selling toy in history, and almost everyone has picked one up, scrambled it and quietly put it back down. This quiz is for people who want to know the story behind the coloured squares. Fifty questions cover Ernő Rubik's original Magic Cube in 1970s Budapest, the Ideal Toy deal and the names it was almost given, the 1981 craze when three of America's top ten books were cube solutions, the mathematics of 43 quintillion permutations and God's number, and the world of speedcubing: Singmaster notation, the CFOP method, blindfolded and one-handed events and the robot that solves it in under half a second. Easy questions ask how many faces the cube has and who invented it; the hard ones want the year the patent expired, the sitcom-style cartoon it spawned, the largest mass-produced cube and the fewest-moves world record. Good for puzzle fans, maths teachers, family quiz nights and anyone who has memorised an algorithm. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Rubik's Cube, Ernő Rubik and speedcubing, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ernő Rubik built his first working cube in 1974 out of small blocks of which material?
Wood
Wood blocks made up the prototype; Rubik was studying how pieces could move independently without the whole thing falling apart, and only realised he had made a puzzle once he had scrambled it.
Q 02How long did Rubik take to solve his prototype?
A month
About a month of trial and error: when he scrambled it he did not even know whether it could be put back, because nobody had ever solved one before.
Q 03Before it was renamed after its inventor in 1980, what was the Rubik's Cube originally called?
Magic Cube
Magic Cube, bűvös kocka in Hungarian, was the name on Rubik's 1975 patent; its American distributor wanted one important change before the 1980 global launch: a new name.
Q 04Will Smith's character solves a Rubik's Cube in a taxi to impress a stockbroker in which film?
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) has Chris Gardner solve the cube to impress a Dean Witter manager, which helps win him a place on the firm's internship; he then flees the taxi because he cannot pay the fare.
Q 05Which of these names was considered for the cube before 'Rubik's Cube' was chosen?
The Gordian Knot
The Gordian Knot and Inca Gold were among the names considered before the company chose to tie the product to its inventor instead.
Q 06Roughly how many Rubik's Cubes had been sold worldwide by 2024?
500 million
500 million is the usual round figure. About 100 million sold in the first two years alone, yet by late 1982 The New York Times was already calling the craze dead.
Q 07Which toy entered the US National Toy Hall of Fame in 2014 alongside the Rubik's Cube?
Green army men
Green army men and bubbles made up the class of 2014 with the cube, which had been a losing finalist several times before; Barbie, LEGO and Monopoly were all among the hall's original inductees.
Q 08On a standard modern cube, which colour is opposite white?
Yellow
Yellow faces white on the standard Western layout; early cubes varied, and on the Japanese scheme still used by some solvers blue and yellow trade places, putting blue opposite white.
Q 09Which of these is one of the six face colours on a classic Rubik's Cube?
Orange
Orange is one of the six. The original cube wore 54 stickers, nine to a face, which chipped and peeled so readily that newer official cubes use coloured plastic tiles instead.
Q 10Which unusual way of solving the cube was an official competition event until it was dropped in 2020?
With the feet
With the feet: after a delegate poll went 58 to 56 against the event, organisers set participation targets that it failed to meet, and it left the official list in 2020.
Q 11How were the pieces of Larry Nichols's 2×2×2 cube puzzle, patented in 1972 before Rubik's cube existed, held together?
Magnets
Magnets held Nichols's eight small cubes together. His employer later sued, and a US appeals court upheld the claim against Rubik's own 2×2×2 in 1986 but cleared the famous 3×3×3 in 1989.
Q 12At which city's toy fair in 1979 was the cube spotted by Tom Kremer, the agent who took it worldwide?
Nuremberg
Nuremberg is where Kremer, a toy inventor and marketer, saw the cube's potential at once; he then persuaded a big American toymaker to launch it worldwide the following year.
Q 13Which whistleblower told journalists they would recognise him in a Hong Kong hotel in 2013 by the Rubik's Cube he carried?
Edward Snowden
Q 21Under official rules, what happens if a cube is one turn away from solved when the timer stops?
Two seconds are added
Two seconds are added to the time, the '+2' penalty; a cube more than one turn from solved counts as a failed attempt, while a face left less than 45 degrees out of line counts as finished.
Q 22What sits at the centre of a 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube?
A three-axis core
A three-axis core holds the six face centres in place while letting them spin, so the cube has only 26 visible pieces, and the 20 that are not centres simply clip in around it.
Q 23Which pieces of a 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube show three colours each?
Corners
Edward Snowden used the cube as his recognition signal when Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras came to meet him; Greenwald had expected a grizzled veteran and was shocked to find a 29-year-old.
Q 14In official competitions a cuber's result is the average of five solves after which of them are discarded?
The fastest and slowest
The fastest and slowest are both dropped, so the result rests on the three middle times: a cuber's best solve of the round does not count towards the average at all, though it is recorded separately.
Q 15What do cubers call it when a piece flies out of the puzzle in the middle of a solve?
A pop
A pop usually means the cube was tensioned too loosely for fast turning; big cubes with many layers are especially prone to it.
Q 16The 1983 cartoon Rubik, the Amazing Cube shared its hour with which arcade character?
Pac-Man
Pac-Man headlined The Pac-Man/Rubik, the Amazing Cube Hour; its cube hero, voiced by Ron Palillo, could only come to life when he was solved.
Q 17Which branch of mathematics is used to analyse the Rubik's Cube's moves?
Group theory
Group theory treats each sequence of turns as something that can be combined and undone; the cube itself proved a handy tool for teaching the subject.
Q 18In which Canadian city did the World Championship return in 2003, after a gap of 21 years?
Toronto
Toronto's Ontario Science Centre hosted the first world championship since 1982; it was run before the sport had any governing body, and prompted the founding of one the following year.
Q 19Which toymaker, the company behind Paw Patrol, agreed in October 2020 to buy the Rubik's Cube brand?
Spin Master
Spin Master agreed to pay $50 million, adding the cube to a run of revived classics that already included Etch A Sketch and the Aerobie flying disc.
Q 20After Rubik's patents expired in 2000, rival cubes built for speed came mainly from companies in which country?
China
China's cube makers engineered their puzzles for speed, and competitive solvers came to favour them over the official Rubik's brand cube.
Corners sit where three faces meet, so each shows three colours; there are eight of them, against twelve two-coloured edges and six single-coloured centres.
Q 24Approximately how many possible arrangements does a 3×3×3 cube have?
43 quintillion
43 quintillion is so many that a solver trying one new arrangement every second would need over a trillion years to see them all; the exact figure is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000.
Q 25A cube for every possible arrangement would cover which of these about 275 times?
The Earth
The Earth would vanish under them about 275 times over; stacked in a single column instead, the same cubes would reach more than 250 light-years, far beyond the nearest stars.
Q 26If a Rubik's Cube is reassembled at random, what is the most likely result?
It cannot be solved
It cannot be solved eleven times in twelve: no sequence of turns can flip a single edge or swap just two pieces, so a randomly rebuilt cube usually lands in a position no amount of twisting can fix.
Q 27What is 'God's number', the maximum moves needed to solve any cube position?
20
20 was proved in July 2010, when a team used about 35 CPU-years of donated computer time to check every position; the proven limit had stood at 26 in 2007 and at 22 in 2008.
Q 28In cubing jargon, what is a memorised sequence of moves with a known effect called?
An algorithm
An algorithm, a term borrowed from mathematics, is usually built to change one small part of the cube and leave the rest untouched, so the same sequence can be repeated until the whole puzzle is done.
Q 29The standard move notation using letters like F, R, U and L was developed by whom?
David Singmaster
David Singmaster, an American mathematician teaching in London, devised it in 1978; because each letter is named from the solver's point of view, a written sequence works whichever way up the cube is held.
Q 30In cube notation, what does a prime symbol after a letter (such as R') indicate?
An anticlockwise turn
An anticlockwise turn, judged as if you were looking straight at that face; the prime simply reverses the plain letter, so R followed by R' leaves the cube exactly as it was.