FTO for WCA???

That is the question that many cubers have been asking over the past year, for many years the only FTO available was the LanLan and it required extensive modding to even be usable, however, in June 2024, DianSheng released their own magnetic FTO and it was instantly so much better than even the best modded LanLan FTO, DaYan then released their own FTO which was even better and QiYi also released their own version which is also very good.

What is FTO?

FTO stands for Face Turning Octahedron, it is rather a shame that no one has come up with a better name for it, it is a unique puzzle that combines solving techniques from various other puzzles, so there is a lot more to it than just a bigger cube or minx puzzle

There has been a lot of talk about whether it could soon become a new WCA event as it has been held unofficially at many speedcubing competitions around the world and has a lot of cubers very interested in practicing it and developing faster solving techniques. Since 3x3 with feet was removed at the end of 2019, people have wondered if something could replace it. The World Cube Association also put out a form asking for public input on interest in new events back in November, this will likely be used to determine if FTO or any other event could be added in 2026

Method overview

This is not intended to teach you how to solve it but to give a basic idea, there are various tutorials online that explain how to solve it.

The FTO has 8 turnable layers so that requires 2 extra letters for notation, these are referred to as BL and BR, if you can already scramble 3x3 then it shouldn’t be too difficult to learn to scramble FTO and then learn some basic algorithms.

The first step is to get 2 triples and one hexagon solved, the hexagon shouldn’t be too difficult if you have any experience with big cubes but can be a bit confusing, the triples are also a bit challenging, essentially you have to match the corner with two pieces of the same colout and then place it in the right spot, I would definitely recommend watching or reading a tutorial

The reason you only solve two triples and not the whole first layer is because you need that slot free to build the other centres, the next 3 centres are solved in what is quite similar to the Yau method for 4x4

You then finally have to solve the last 4 triples, there are various ways to so this, most involve some form of sledging or hedging (based on the hedgeslammer algorithm for 3x3 which is R’ F R F’ and often used to insert F2L pairs)

Images are extracted from Ben’s ‘Bencisco’ method tutorial which a lot of people have used to learn to solve the puzzle, I am not sure if it is the best tutorial but it definitely can work well for some people.