What type of strategy game is this? You rearrange positions?

Question

What do you call games where you have to move and re-arrange cars or boxes to move a goal box into a location. There have been games like this since Atari, as far as I know. It's some kind of tactical game. I can maybe draw an example, as a kind of flow chart:

1.

Goal Block Item
xxxx       xxxx

2.

Goal       Item
xxxx Block xxxx

3.

Goal Item  <--
xxxx Block xxxx

4.

WIN  <---------
xxxx Block xxxx

If you possibly know the first game of this kind, I would be interested in that, or any game names. If you add pictures or media or links to the same, that would be useful.

Asked by Wolfpack'08

Answer

I'd say puzzle game, and more accurately sliding blocks puzzle game.

Examples of sliding puzzles

• Fifteen puzzle
• Inakube
• Klotski (mentioned here by Hex)
• Minus Cube
• Jumbly
• Sokoban (mentioned here by Konrad)

Otherwise, there's also a list of puzzle game types on Wikipedia, but I think that the previously given term is the best match.

Answered by Anto

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How to move two aligned tile pieces to the top of a scheme in sliding puzzles?

Question

While playing Cogs, I have found myself plenty of times in this irritating situation. I have this:

.--. 
|XY| (where I don't really care about X, Y, or Z)
|AB|
|Z |
....

...while what I want is this:

.--. 
|AB| (where again, I'll sort X, Y and Z later.)
|XY|
|Z |
....

I'm tired of trying to get this by accident. By goodness, you how do you make that happen consistently?

Answer

.--.   .--.   .--.   .--.   .--.   .--.   .--.   .--.   .--.   .--. 
|XY| → |XY| → |XY| → |↓Y| → |Y←| → |YA| → |YA| → |↓A| → |A←| → |AB|
|AB| → |A↓| → |→A| → |XA| → |XA| → |XB| → |XB| → |YB| → |YB| → |Y↑|
|Z | → |ZB| → |ZB| → |ZB| → |ZB| → |Z↑| → |→Z| → |XZ| → |XZ| → |XZ|
....   ....   ....   ....   ....   ....   ....   ....   ....   ....

10 moves.

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