What is the Rush Hour puzzle?
Rush Hour is a classic sliding-block logic puzzle set on a 6×6 grid. Your red car is stuck in a traffic jam of cars and trucks, and the only way out is the exit gap on the right side of the board. Vehicles can only slide forward or backward along their own orientation — never sideways — so freeing the red car means working out the right sequence of slides.
How to play:
- Choose a difficulty and how many puzzles you want to solve, then click Start Puzzle
- Tap or click a vehicle to select it — it glows gold
- Tap a square along its line of movement to slide it there (it stops if another vehicle blocks the way)
- On desktop, you can also use the arrow keys to nudge the selected vehicle one square at a time
- Use Undo to take back any number of moves — undone moves don't count
- The Hint button plays one move from the best possible solution for the current position
- The puzzle completes the moment the red car reaches the exit
Scoring:
- Your Moves: Total slides used — one slide of any distance counts as one move
- Best Possible: The minimum number of moves, computed by exhaustive search when the puzzle was created
- Solving Time: Only active solving time is counted — pauses between puzzles are excluded
- Matching the best possible count is the real challenge on Hard puzzles
Strategy tips:
- Work backwards: look at which vehicles block the red car's row, then which vehicles block those
- Trucks (3 squares long) are the key obstacles — they have less room to move, so plan their parking spots first
- Sometimes a vehicle must move "the wrong way" first to open space for another — that's the heart of the puzzle
- Every puzzle here was generated and verified by computer search, so a solution always exists