Rush Hour (board game)

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Rush Hour is a rearrangement puzzle invented by Nob Yoshigahara in the late 1970s and first sold in the United States in 1996. It is manufactured by ThinkFun (formerly Binary Arts). The goal of the game is to get a red car out of a six-by-six grid full of automobiles by moving the other vehicles out of its way. However, the cars and trucks (set up before play according to a puzzle card) obstructing your path are so intertwined that a typical puzzle requires many moves to complete.

ThinkFun now sells Rush Hour spin-offs Rush Hour Jr., Safari Rush Hour and Railroad Rush Hour, with puzzles by Scott Kim.

Extra puzzle card packs (in addition to the 40 cards included with the game) are also available.

Generalized rush hour, played on an arbitrarily large board, is known to be PSPACE-complete to solve (see http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/266206.html).

[edit] External links

• ThinkFun's Rush Hour product page
• Rush Hour at Puzzles.COM

[edit] Computer Implementations

• Online version of Rush Hour in Java
• A Rush Hour implementation in Java
• Online Rush Hour
• Gridlock, a Flash implementation
• RushHour by Bunnylabs, a Flash implementation with isometric view
• PyTraffic, a Python implementation
• Rush Hour Solver