How to play
The teal circle is you, standing on a warehouse floor. The orange squares are crates, the faded dots set into the floor are the marks where the crates belong, and a crate turns green the second it lands on one. A level ends when every crate is green — the twelve on this page use between one and four crates each.
You have exactly one action available: walk into a crate and it slides one square further along the line you were walking. That single rule is the whole game, and three consequences follow from it. There is no way to pull, so any square you shove a crate into is a square you have to be content leaving it in. There is no way to move two crates at once, because the crate behind the first one has nowhere to go. And a crate only travels in the direction you are already facing, which means the square on the opposite side has to be empty for you to stand in before the push is even possible.
That last point is the one that catches people out. Wanting a crate to go left is not the same as being able to send it left: you have to physically get round to its right-hand side first, and the route round may be blocked by the wall, by another crate, or by the crate you already parked somewhere helpful.
Controls
- Walking — the arrow keys or W A S D. On a phone or tablet, swipe across the board in the direction you want to step.
- Undo — the button or Z. It keeps the entire history of the level, so you can hold the key down and rewind to the first move if you need to.
- Restart level — the button or R, which puts every crate back where it started and resets the two counters.
- Previous level and Next level move through the twelve in order; there is no lock on them, so you can skip ahead and come back.
- Moves counts every step you take, Pushes only the steps that shifted a crate, and Best moves is the lowest total you have finished this particular level in. Solved shows how many of the twelve you have cleared.
Reading a level backwards
Beginners play forwards: they see a crate, see a mark, and start shoving. The levels that beat them are the ones where the correct first move is on a crate that is nowhere near a mark. The habit worth building is to plan each crate from its destination back to where it stands now, and to do it before you take a single step.
Start from a mark and ask which square a crate must occupy immediately before it lands there. That gives you a direction of travel. Now ask where you would have to be standing to deliver that final push, and whether that square is floor. Repeat backwards, one square at a time, and you either arrive at a crate — in which case you have a route — or you hit a wall, in which case the mark has to be served from a different side and you try again.
The fifth level, Under the beam, is the cleanest illustration of why this matters. Two crates sit in a row with a solid beam directly above them and the two marks directly below. Every instinct says push down. You cannot: to push a crate down you have to stand above it, and above each crate is the beam. The only legal pushes are sideways, so the answer is to shove each crate out from under the beam, walk round and above it through the space the beam does not cover, drive it down past the row of marks, and then push it sideways back in. Eight pushes in total, but every one of them is forced once you have noticed that the first push has to go the wrong way.
The second habit is ordering. When two crates head for the same corner of the room, the one that has to travel furthest usually has to go first, because a crate sitting on its mark is still a solid object that blocks pushes and blocks you. On Order of service the three crates all drop straight down onto three marks, and the level is still capable of embarrassing you: fill the near mark first and the crate you parked there is standing in the corridor the next crate needed.
Corners, walls, and the warning line
A crate in a corner is finished. Two walls meeting behind it remove both remaining push directions, and nothing in the game can ever move it again. If that corner has a mark in it, you have just solved part of the level. If it does not, the level is over and you simply have not noticed yet.
Because that is the single most common way an evening goes wrong, the board checks for it after every push and writes a plain warning into the status line, naming the row and column of the crate that is now stuck. It does not undo the move for you and it does not block it — sometimes you want to shunt a crate into a corner deliberately to get it out of a corridor, and a game that refuses your input is more annoying than one that tells you the truth and lets you decide.
What the warning does not do is catch everything. A crate pushed flat against a long wall can still slide along it, so the game does not complain, but if no mark sits anywhere on that wall the crate is just as lost as one in a corner. Two crates side by side against the same wall are equally hopeless. Treat the warning as a smoke alarm rather than a fire brigade: it tells you about the obvious disaster, and reading the room is still your job.
How long a level takes, from our own play testing and offered only as estimates: under a minute for level one, two or three minutes each for levels two to four, five to ten minutes through the middle of the set, and anywhere from fifteen minutes to a couple of sittings for Shelf life and The back room. The shortest finishes we have been able to confirm run from 3 moves on the first level to 118 on the twelfth, which is a useful reminder that your first successful attempt is never meant to be efficient.
Where the puzzle came from
Sokoban was created by Hiroyuki Imabayashi and published by the Japanese software house Thinking Rabbit in 1982. The name is Japanese for warehouse keeper, which is exactly the job description: you are not a hero, you are staff, and the crates are heavier than you are.
What kept it alive for four decades is that the rules fit in one sentence while the puzzles do not. Sokoban became a standard test case in artificial intelligence research precisely because it defeats the obvious approaches — the branching is wide, the useful moves are rare, and a position can be unrecoverable long before anything looks wrong. Computer scientists established in the 1990s that deciding whether a general Sokoban level can be solved at all is PSPACE-complete, which is a formal way of saying that no clever shortcut is coming and even a machine has to think.
The twelve floors here are our own designs, drawn for this page rather than borrowed from any published set, and the code that runs them was written for this site. Before publication each map went through a search over the graph of possible pushes, which both proved that a finish exists and reported the cheapest one; those cheapest routes are the numbers quoted above.
Questions players ask
Are all twelve levels definitely solvable?
Yes. Each map was checked by a search that explores every reachable arrangement of crates and returns the shortest finish, so none of them is impossible by accident. The best routes it found go from 3 moves on level one up to 118 on level twelve.
Why does undo let me rewind the whole level?
Because a single step of undo is useless in this puzzle. The move that ruins a Sokoban level is usually six or seven pushes behind the moment you notice, so the history is kept in full and Z walks back through it as far as you like.
Can I lose without the game telling me?
Yes. The board warns you when a crate ends up in a corner with no mark under it, which is the most common jam, but a crate stranded along a bare wall is just as final and passes unremarked. If a level stops making progress, restarting is not an admission of defeat.
Where are my finished levels stored?
In this browser only, under keys starting with bg:. Your completed list, your best
move count for each level and the level you last had open all live there. Nothing is sent anywhere,
and clearing site data wipes them.