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I like how the holonomy adds a new level of difficulty.

I first put the tiles in the right spots, then tried reorienting them by cycling the tiles in each quadrant, but I had some kind of parity issue: the sum of the orientation offsets was 2 mod 4, and this sum was invariant under the cycling I was doing. So I scrambled and put them in the right spots again, and fortunately the sum became 0 mod 4, so I was able to solve.

I'm curious if the puzzle is solvable from any board state (e.g. the solved state with one tile rotated 90°, or two tiles swapped).

Nice observation! Exactly half of all states are solvable, and both of your examples (one tile rotated 90°, or two tiles swapped) are unsolvable.

Proof sketch: With the blank in the center, (number of inversions + total rotation) mod 2 is preserved. Those states have invariant 1 while the solved state has 0, so they can’t be reached.

One tile rotated 180° should be solvable. The game only generates solvable boards.