Rush Hour (puzzle)
sliding block puzzle
Rush Hour is a sliding block puzzle invented by Nob Yoshigahara in the 1970s. It was first sold in the United States in 1996. It is now being manufactured by ThinkFun (formerly Binary Arts).
ThinkFun now sells Rush Hour spin-offs Rush Hour Jr., Safari Rush Hour, Railroad Rush Hour, Rush Hour Brain Fitness and Rush Hour Shift, with puzzles by Scott Kim. The game sold more than 1 million units.
Game
The board is a 6×6 grid with grooves in the tiles to allow cars to slide, card tray to hold the cards, current active card holder and an exit hole. The game comes with 16 vehicles (12 cars, 4 trucks), each colored differently, and 40 puzzle cards. Cars and trucks are both one square wide, but cars are two squares long and trucks are three squares long. Vehicles can only be moved along a straight line on the grid; rotation is forbidden. Puzzle cards, each with a level number that indicates the difficulty of the challenge, show the starting positions of cars and trucks.
The public source identifies “Rush Hour (puzzle)” as sliding block puzzle. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rush, Hour and puzzle.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rush Hour (puzzle)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.