About

Sokoban (Japanese for "warehouse keeper") is a puzzle game where you push boxes onto target markers in a confined warehouse. You can push a box by walking into it, but you cannot pull. Boxes can only move if there's empty space on the other side. One wrong push traps a box in a corner and the puzzle becomes unsolvable — requiring an undo or full restart.

The puzzles are fiendishly clever. Every level is a carefully designed logic problem where the solution requires a precise sequence of moves. The irreversibility of pushes means each decision has permanent consequences, creating a tension unusual in puzzle games.

Sokoban is deceptively deep — simple levels teach the rules; advanced levels demand holding an entire sequence in your head. Perfect for a focused 10-minute puzzle session.

How to Play

• Use arrow keys to move your character through the warehouse.
• Walk into a box to push it one square in the direction you're moving.
• Boxes cannot be pulled — only pushed.
• Place all boxes on the marked target squares to complete the level.
• Use undo (Ctrl+Z or Z) when a box gets stuck in an unsolvable position.

Tips

• Never push a box into a corner unless it's the target — corners are permanent traps.
• Plan pushes in sequence from the final position backwards.
• Watch for "deadlock" patterns: two boxes against a wall with no targets create an unsolvable state.

History

Sokoban was designed by Hiroyuki Imabayashi and published by Thinking Rabbit in Japan in 1982. It was originally developed as a programming exercise and then turned into a commercial product. The game spread globally through personal computers in the 1980s and has been reimplemented thousands of times. Sokoban has a formal research community — it is PSPACE-complete (computationally hard to solve optimally), making it a benchmark problem in AI puzzle-solving research.