Rush Hour Traffic Jam Puzzle

The objective of Rush Hour is to move the little red car out of the snarled up traffic gridlock that the game begins with. Rush Hour arrives with 40 challenge cards, which depict various gridlock scenarios to set up your traffic jam to. Use the coloured Troublesome Trucks and Aggravating Autos to reflect the chaos on your particular challenge card. Then all you have to do is move the blocking vehicles up or down on the grid in order to free up the escape route for your own red car. And yet this wonderfully simple concept is enthrallingly more difficult to execute. Who knows, maybe the real London rush hour is easier on the nerves than the Binary Arts version.

The challenge cards themselves offer four different levels of complexity and all solutions are printed on the back.

Yet not only is Rush Hour great fun but it can also boast strong educational benefits, teaching problem solving to children of seven years plus. In the US Rush Hour is used in some primary school maths classes. Even a smart four-year-old will find some reward by trying to replicate the traffic set-up scenario of the challenge cards.

Rush Hour can be enjoyed by one player or various players competing.

Suitable for children from 7 years old and all adults who enjoy an ingenious little challenge.--Victoria Mackenzie

Product Description
There's an understated elegance to Rush Hour, one of the most inspired and intriguing sliding block puzzles we've so far encountered here in the lab at gadgetshop HQ. It's designed to challenge players of all ages, teaching logical progression, problem solving and sequential-thinking skills. And that's just to open the box. This multi award-winning puzzle - and its inventor Nob Yoshigahara - have picked-up no fewer than 21 gongs in the past decade; a surefire testament to its longevity, durability and worldwide appeal. The objective sounds easy in theory. Drive your red car out of the playing grid and escape to freedom. But in order to so, you'll first need to set up the traffic on a game grid to match one of 40 playing cards, then shift all the blocking cars and trucks out of your way. This is more easily said than done, as a clear and transparent set of rules then come into play. To proceed, one simply needs to move one vehicle at a time, in a long sequence of moves designed to free the red car from the logjam and out of the parking lot. All of which will have one scratching one's noggin- and driving one to the web for a solution. Brilliantly infuriating - and infuriatingly brilliant.