📦 Sokoban

Sokoban is a warehouse with no forklift and no second grip. You walk a small keeper through rooms of walls and treasure chests. Each chest has to rest on a golden key tile. When every chest sits on a key, the room opens. Until then the floor remembers every shove.

You can only push, never pull, and only one chest at a time. That single rule is the whole weather of the game. A chest against a wall has one remaining direction. A chest in a corner has none. Two chests pressed together can lock a corridor that looked wide a minute ago. The keeper can also wall himself in, staring at a finish line he can no longer reach.

The Japanese name, 倉庫番, just means warehouse keeper. Hiroyuki Imabayashi made the first rooms in 1982, and the grammar has barely changed since: walk, push, do not get greedy. This set holds about 490 of those rooms. Early ones teach you to leave yourself an exit. Middle ones start using the chest as a door you will need later. Late ones look empty until you notice there is only one legal order.

Deadlock is the word people use when the map is still full of space and already finished against you. Sometimes you see it immediately. Sometimes you notice ten moves later, when the last chest has no path that does not smash it into another. Unlimited undo is here so the lesson does not cost the whole evening. Backspace takes one shove back. The better habit is to undo in your head first.

Nobody rushes a good Sokoban room. You stand in the doorway, count the keys, and ask which chest is allowed to move now. The pleasure is not speed. It is the moment a jammed floor suddenly has air again, because you pushed the awkward chest first and left the easy one for last.