Wagon Yard

A fenced stockyard, six tiles by six, packed with freight wagons, hay carts and ox teams. Your covered wagon sits in the third row, and the gate in the right-hand fence is open. Every piece can only roll along its own track — a wagon lying across the yard slides left and right, one lying along it slides up and down — until it meets another piece or the fence. Shunt the others out of the way until your wagon can roll straight out the gate.

Wagons are two tiles long; ox teams, two oxen and a yoke, are three. Nothing turns, nothing lifts, and nothing passes through anything else.

Moves and par

One slide of one piece is one move, however far it goes — drag it two tiles or four, it is still one. Slide the same piece twice running and that counts as one move too, because one slide could have done it. Every yard has a par: the fewest moves that get your wagon out, worked out by searching every position the yard can reach before you ever see it. Finish at par for three stars, within three of par for two, and any finish earns one. Undo and Reset are always there and cost nothing on the count — but a run that never used either is clean, and the clean badges ask for that.

The obvious move

From Medium up, every yard has a trap: the piece sitting nearest the gate in your wagon's way — the one you want to move first — is never the right first move. Something else has to shift before it can.

The Daily

Every day there is one new yard, a Medium, the same for everybody in the world, turning over at midnight UTC. There is no clock to beat — take as long as you like; it is the moves that count, and stars are what you share. There are no hints on the Daily. Free play has four levels — Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert, the deepest yards — and three hints a yard: a hint lights the piece to move and shows where it should go; it never moves anything for you.

Replay a yard

Every free-play yard has a number. When you finish one short of three stars, the card offers it again — the one puzzle here where going back to the same yard is the point.

Where it comes from

Wagon Yard is a sliding-block escape puzzle, the family best known from the traffic-jam puzzles in which a car must be got out of a crowded car park. This one is set in a stockyard at golden hour.

The rules in full, moves and par, the levels, the skins and the badges are in the Wagon Yard guide.