Rush Hour

Where’s The Rush?

Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam, say at a round about, where no one can move until someone else has moved? Do you feel you’d like to relive that experience in the comfort of your own home? Or smugly sitting on a train as it whizzes past the crammed commuters? No? You surprise me!

Well Rush Hour may only symbolically reproduce those sensations but what it does do is provide 1 player plus possible friends and/or advisers with a solid set of sliding block puzzles ranging in difficulty from facile to moderate.

The Only Way Is Sideways

Yes Rush Hour is a sliding block or Move the Mountain, if you will, puzzle set with 40 different puzzles to solve. These are presented on a deck of nicely printed cards each with their easy to follow solution on the reverse.

Now you either like the tactile, tactical, test of a sliding block puzzle – or you don’t. If you don’t then stop reading now. Fortunately I do. Indeed I just spent a large part of my idle moments in January this year trying to solve a Move the Mountain style wooden puzzle my daughter gave me for Christmas (Yes I did eventually solve it if you were wondering!).

Rush Hour, in keeping with its’ theme has 16 ruggedly built plastic models of cars and lorries that sit on a lattice grid of 6 x 6 squares. The 4 lorries are each 3 squares long and the 12 cars are each 2 squares long. They are all brightly coloured in different shades. One of the cars, the red one, is the one that you will have to attempt to manoeuvre out through the one exit hole and off the grid. The other cars and lorries are there to block its’ passage.

You select a card to play. Place the cars and lorries on the grid as shown, then start. You can slide any of the vehicles along into an empty space thus freeing a space behind it which can then allow another move into that space and so on. Look, you all know how these things work, right? The only difference here to other puzzles is that the vehicles can only move forward and back in relation to their length i.e. no sideways moves. Thus you can’t use the round and round moves common to other puzzles to recycle pieces.

**Potential spoiler alert!** This means a piece will never leave the row, if horizontal, or column, if vertical that it started on and you need to consider that when planning your exit strategy.

Rush To Finish

The pieces of Rush Hour are colourful and well made. The gridded board is sturdy and there are little indentations in the grooves that the wheels slot into so each move concludes with a satisfying click. There is a clear plastic lid that goes over the set for storage (once you have remembered/worked out how the pieces fit back in so the lid will close!). Finally a nice, mesh on one side, draw-string bag that you can put the whole lot in and take on your travels. The set is specified for age 8+. I think that is reasonable and it should withstand a fair amount of rough play and/or travel.

Now the puzzles themselves. The 40 cards are ranked in 4 sets of difficulty from Beginner through Intermediate, Advanced up to Expert. I tried 9 different levels : 1; 5; 11; 15; 22; 29; 33; 37 and 40 which took me from 1 minute up to 13 minutes to complete. The average time was under 6 minutes – including No. 40 the so-called hardest one. Now I’m reasonably good at visio-spatial dexterity, though I could never solve a Rubik’s cube, But for me this set represents a total play time or under 4 hours.

I did find the process enjoyable though and yes, you could play the levels again as it’s almost impossible to remember how you solved each one. Whilst it is designed as a solo puzzle you could play competitively by each drawing a card and seeing who could solve their’s fastest though you’ll just have to twiddle your thumbs whilst your opponent has a go.

Rush To Buy?

It’s a nicely made puzzle game with some well-thought out puzzles. It’s not, for me, overly demanding, but it’s pleasant enough to slide the vehicles around. The Thinkfun slogan promises to “ignite your Mind” I’m afraid I need a bit more spark of Rush Hour to light my fire but I’ll keep it on my shelf for 6 and a half years until my eighteen month old granddaughter is old enough to play it. I’m sure she’ll love it.