Sokoban

The computer game Sokoban was invented by Hiroyuki Imabayashi and first published in 1982 by his company Thinking Rabbit.

The game principle ist very simple: you're supposed to move all objects - usually boxes - one after another onto prepared target fields with a player figure. To make things hard, the objects may only be pushed, not pulled. Finally, you're supposed to make as few steps as possible.

The game got classic very soon and was released for almost any game system on this planet. My first contact with Sokoban was Boxxle for Nintendo Gameboy, and I couldn't stop playing until I solved all 120 levels.

By now, there are numerous Sokoban player programs for PC which, thanks to a standard level file format and to many hobby level designers,work with countless Sokoban levels to play. Some of those players have advanced features like automatic route finders, recorders, replays and level editors.

In the meantime, I'm an enthusiastic Sokoban player and occasional level designer as well. For both tasks, I use...

Sokoban for Windows

Sokoban for Windows was written by Björn Källmark and is an incredible Sokoban player program and level editor with all the features you could ask for. The program is shareware and costs $16,90 after a 30 day trial period. If you're not willing to pay this, you may of course use one of the meanwhile available freeware players. However, I got used to SfW so much, that I wouldn't miss it anymore.

SfW features a skin editor as well. So, with a little graphic experience, you will be able to push around beer barrels through pubs as well...

Our own Sokoban Player: SokoBen

In early 2008, I decided to develop my own Sokoban game for our website, based on JavaScript and PHP. To be honest, the project should mainly distract myself from some hard times. So I spend a lot of anyway sleepless nights for development. Based upon my PHP libraries for levelset file handling, I implemented a fullfeatured player in just a few weeks. SokoBen features level rotation and mirroring, mouse control with automatic pathfinding when moving and automatic pushing over four axles, automatic solution replay and automatic play of entered LURD strings. Pathfinding utilizes a Dijkstra algorithm, which was implemented in JavaScript by Harald Samman.

SokoBen

Our levels

Playing Sokoban for a while, you'll soon come to some ideas for own levels. What's easier, than putting those ideas together and create your own levels with the level editor? Well, to be honest, a lot. Good levels need to be be well-constructed, well-tested and, if put in a level set, wisely arranged. But with some hard work and a lot of fun, nothing is impossible.

And so, I made the following level sets by now:

Demons & Diamonds

Cubes & Tubes

Our skins

I designed a skin for SfW as well. Honestly, I prefer the Boxxle scenario of boxes and warehouse walls over the standard skin with marbles and holes.

Crate Keeper