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It's fully random, so not guaranteed to be solvable.
However, I believe every starting condition should be solvable. ;)

If it is completely random then there is a possibility a starting position would be impossible. For example: The right half of the board is all grey 5 and the left side is all purple 1. You would never be able to merge the last two.

Every token is unique. 5 different colors and 5 different values, makes 25 unique tokens. Their position on the 5x5 grid is fully randomized. However, people in my Discord found a starting condition which would make even the first move impossible. :)

Someone else and me wondered the same and found one starting arrangement that is not solvable and slight variations of it where we aren't sure. We got that down to 2 tokens so far. I think the chance of getting an unsolvable one is very very slim, but we try to find out more conclusively.

(1 edit)

(Slight repost) I made a Boxit solver in JavaScript, and couldn't manage to find an unsolvable starting board after going through something like 10000 starting boards. The full space is 25!, which even when accounting for color exchanges (5!), symbol exchanges (5!), row exchanges (5!), column exchanges (5!), and transpositions (2) is still around 1.6e22, so my search has not been exhaustive by any means.

So, I would be pretty interested if there is, in fact, an unsolvable board :).

Edit: I have constructed an unsolvable board by hand ("fodwqbutimrgkexncvpjyshla"). Still, I wonder if there are other unsolvable boards apart from its reflections. Even better if they are unsolvable because it is impossible to get them down to one tile, not because it is impossible to move from the very beginning. (If this is the only group of unsolvable boards, then landing on it (1 in 1.6e22) would be equivalent to getting ~73 coin flips landing heads.)

Hatnix mentioned it today, very cool! I didn't come around to trying it yet.
I did construct a possibly unsolvable one by slightly modifying the unsolvable one (we had something similar to yours: https://ibb.co/6XDt3bx). Essentially what I did was exchange the two ones in the corners. We manually got it down to two tokens but not solve it yet.

Unless I messed up the board input, swapping the two ones in the corners makes that board solvable: https://ibb.co/wKTcHdp :)