Huarongdao

Huarongdao is a famous Chinese puzzle, similar to but also different from the popular sliding puzzles. It is named after the Huarong Way, where Cao Cao fled through after his defeat during the Battle of Red Cliffs. Like the sliding puzzles, this game is played on a rectangular board with pieces affixed within the board, and there are also empty slots where pieces can be moved into. In this game though, a player is required to move a designated piece of rectangle to an 'exit', rather than move all the pieces into a fixed pattern (as the pieces do not have any pattern or number on their faces). To make the game harder, all of the pieces are not of the same size. Some are simple one-by-one or two-by-two squares, others are one-by-two or even one-by-three rectangles. The pieces can not jump, nor can they change direction of a same shape (like in tetris).

This game is not considered extremely challenging because as the board gets larger, the game actually gets easier and the minimum number of moves smaller. But there are certain small-board patterns which can produce quite a dilemma for a beginner to this game (e.g. try the pattern in the external link below). Like in sliding puzzles, depending on the skill of the player, this game can be solved in varied number of moves, but preferably in as few moves as possible.

External links

* [http://hrd.sourceforge.net]