This Stock Puzzle consists of a 4×5 board with sliding blocks. One block is 2×2; the other blocks are 2×1, 1×2 and 1×1. The goal of the puzzle is to get the 2×2 block into the bottom position.
There are variations of this puzzle based on differences in the initial position or the number of blocks of various sizes. It is sometimes known as the Dad's Puzzle, where the theme is a father trying to move around pieces of furniture or the Pennant Puzzle.
Compare Inventory Management Puzzle, when organizing Grid Inventory-Systems can get incredibly tedious. See also Tetris and Sokoban, video games based on the idea of sliding blocks around.
Examples:
Anime & Manga
- MegaMan NT Warrior: The ending theme, Hikari Todoku Basho, has a short animation of the puzzle being solved in the background near the start of the video.
- Phi-Brain: Puzzle of God: One of the second season's episodes features this as the puzzle of the week.
Live-Action TV
- Survivor: A regularly used challenge component throughout the history of the series but known by the more generic term 'slide puzzle'. Typically an ax or other blade is embedded in the 2x2 piece; after freeing the piece, the blade is used to cut a rope, which often unfurls a victory banner. In more recent years, an eight-piece/4x4 variant is more often used, occasionally with crate-size pieces so large that they require several people to move.
Video Games
- 3 out of 10: A stock puzzle to retrieve an intern from the supply closet, with stars awarded for the fewest moves.
- The 11th Hour: The furniture puzzle.
- Adventure Escape:
- Hidden Ruins: Used to get a plug-in.
- Dark Ruins: It's an image of the Storm Goddess that needs to be moved to the top.
- Beyond the Beyond: While hiding in the church to escape a hot pursuit, you encounter a sliding tile puzzle that you must solve in order to not be killed by the Big Bad.
- The Cabinets of Doctor Arcana: The Cabinet in the Gallery with the Classical aesthetic is a very simplified version of this.
- Clubhouse Games: "Escape" is a Klotski clone.
- Companions of Xanth: It includes an optional Klotski puzzle.
- Dark Tales: One of the locks in the Davies estate takes the form of this kind of puzzle.
- Elephant Games: Klotski puzzles are a recurrent feature of their Hidden Object Games.
- Hoshi Saga: In the 48th stage, a deceptively difficult Klotski puzzle appears. It just requires a click-and-drag to be solved.
- Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals: The "World's Most Difficult Trick".
- Professor Layton:
- Obscenely difficult versions are typically the final puzzles in each game.
- Professor Layton and the Curious Village: "The Princess in the Box" is the last puzzle found while climbing the tower. It requires eighty-three moves to be completed.
- Quest For Karma: "Last Pedestal of Buddha".
- Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure: One of the last puzzles in the game uses a magnet to move blocks around under a pane of glass. One of them contains a key that has to be slid out from behind the glass.
- Season of Mystery: The Cherry Blossom Murders: When rescuing the daughter, you need to solve a small Klotsi puzzle. It's on the easy size, due to the lack of vertical pieces.
- Spongebob Squarepants Battle For Bikini Bottom: A few puzzles in the PC version.
- Trace: The lock on the inside of the bathroom door is a modified version.
Video Games — Operative Systems
- Microsoft Windows:
- Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3: One of the games included is Klotski; three levels of eight puzzles each, starting with several variants of the puzzle described above, then moving through more complex puzzles and culminating in a 27×27-square puzzle titled Sunshine. This final puzzle, requiring some 2,000-plus moves to get the 5×5 block to its home, takes not so much ingenuity as patience: With only five squares' leeway, each square required for a single move of the red piece, work the red piece down to the door, then tediously work it around the edge of the puzzle and back up to the top.
- In conjunction with DOSBox, a Nintendo Hard Klotski clone called Bricks was created. It includes, among other things, magnetic pieces, walls that pop up if you slide something over them, pieces that can't move until a certain "key" piece is brought to a certain position, and unconnected groups of pieces that move as one unit. And that's just in the first installment.
- GNOME: Its desktop environment includes a straightforward Klotski game in the GNOME Games package.
Websites
- Archie Comics Website: There's a Java puzzle called "Traffic Jam", in which the player must move Archie's red car to the exit by rearranging other vehicles in the parking lot. A physical version of this has been sold under the name "Rush Hour".
Web Videos
- JonTron: In "Plug-and-Play Consoles", Jon is eager to get Huarongdao, a game he thinks it's about Ancient Chinese warfare. In reality, its "another shitty [Klotski] puzzle game" that requires matching creepy pictures of Chinese generals.
Real Life
- The International Obfuscated C Code Contest had a winning entry one year that solved this puzzle. Here's the catch: When presenting its moves and the current state of the board, it would print out valid C code (obfuscated to look like the blocks)... which compiled into a program that did the same thing but faster.
