About

Origin

Nob Yoshigahara called it Tokyo Parking. This one's been relocated.

Nob Yoshigahara (1936–2004) brought his wooden Tokyo Parking puzzle to Binary Arts in 1995, and they licensed it from him. He hand-built the first 160 challenges himself.

The print

Four copies, printed in Toronto, one each. A 6x6 peg-and-channel board with a white frame, black asphalt, glow-green markings and translucent pieces. Each box holds four blue cars and a blue truck, four yellow cars and two yellow trucks, four green cars and a green truck, two yellow pylons, and the red car.

The board and the pieces are printed from Martin Kozak's model on MakerWorld, shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The small edits and the colours are this set's own.

The rules

Every piece slides along its own lane and never turns. Get the red car out through the gap in the wall. Pylons don't move.

Par is the fewest moves the position allows, so a card solved in par cannot be solved in fewer. There are 60 cards, ordered easiest to hardest.

Credits

You may know it as Rush Hour, the version Binary Arts published in 1996 and ThinkFun sold for decades.

The 60 layouts are drawn from Michael Fogleman's 2018 database of every interesting 6x6 position with up to two walls, each solved to a proven minimum. His write-up is at michaelfogleman.com/rush.

No official edition has fixed obstacles. The two pylons are this set's own addition; Fogleman's database calls them walls.

RUSH HOUR is a registered trademark of Ravensburger North America, Inc. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ravensburger or ThinkFun.