Daily Brains · one gridlocked car park a day — slide your way out in par.
Daily Parking is the sliding-block puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Every day the whole world gets the same jammed car park. Vehicles are stuck in their lanes: side-on ones slide left and right, nose-down ones slide up and down. Shuffle them about until your red car can drive out of the exit on the right, in as few moves as you can. Every lot was solved by computer in advance, so par is the true minimum, not a guess.
STORY & LORE
A week of car parks
Difficulty follows the weekday. Monday is a gentle 6×6 lot solvable in 6–10 moves; Tuesday needs 10–14, Wednesday 13–17, Thursday 16–21 and Friday 20–27. The weekend moves to a bigger 7×7 multi-storey with extra hazards: Saturday's lots need 24–30 moves and Sunday's need 30 or more (up to 60).
Weekend hazards
Bollards are fixed posts that never move. The tow truck is a three-cell vehicle that blocks a whole lane. The one-way ramp is a striped square with an arrow: a vehicle may only drive onto it travelling the way the arrow points, though it can always back off again. Because of the ramp some moves cannot be undone by sliding back, and it is possible to gridlock yourself — Undo and Reset get you out.
How the lots are made
Lots are generated offline by a hill-climbing search: it builds a random car park, works out every position reachable from it, and keeps tweaking the layout until some position needs the target number of moves. The puzzle starts you in that position. A bank of 60 lots per weekday ships with the game, each re-proved by an independent breadth-first search in the test suite, and the schedule deals each weekday's list in a fixed shuffled order so no lot repeats for over a year.
HOW IT PLAYS
Moving
Drag a vehicle along its lane; it snaps to the nearest bay when you let go. One move is one vehicle sliding any distance in one go. On a keyboard, Tab or the number keys 1–9 pick a vehicle, the arrow keys slide it one bay (a run of presses on the same vehicle counts as one move) and Shift+arrow slides it as far as it will go. U or Backspace undoes, H asks for a hint.
Undo, Reset and hints
Undo puts the last vehicle back without charging another move, but the slide you took back still counts. Reset puts every vehicle back where the day started; your move count carries on. A hint lights up a vehicle that is part of a shortest way out and shows which way to slide it, for a fee of 2 moves.
Medals and scoring
Your total is moves plus hint fees. Exactly par earns Gold (and counts as a perfect day), within 25% of par Silver, within 60% Bronze, anything else is still an escape. Score is 1000 × par ÷ total, never below 100 for an escape, so the daily maximum is 1000.
Giving up
Call the tow truck ends the day as a loss and replays a shortest way out from where you stand, so you can see the trick. It breaks the streak.
The ticket
Finishing prints a pay-and-display ticket with your moves, par, hint fees and medal, plus a strip that grades your solve: each square is green when every move in it brought you closer to the exit, yellow for shuffling that made no progress and red for moves that backed you further away (or gridlocked you). Long solves are squeezed into ten squares. The share text carries the strip, your medal and the puzzle number, never the lot itself.
THE WEEK
| Day | Lot | Par (moves) | Extras |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday · Gentle | 6×6 | 6–10 | — |
| Tuesday · Steady | 6×6 | 10–14 | — |
| Wednesday · Tricky | 6×6 | 13–17 | — |
| Thursday · Tough | 6×6 | 16–21 | — |
| Friday · Devious | 6×6 | 20–27 | — |
| Saturday · Wicked | 7×7 | 24–30 | bollards, one-way ramp, tow truck |
| Sunday · Fiendish | 7×7 | 30–60 | bollards, one-way ramp, tow truck |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Escape the lot | 15 Tickets |
| Escape in exactly par, no hints (perfect) | +25 Tickets |
| Pulled Out (first escape) | 🚗 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Perfect Park (par, no hints) | 🅿️ Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Season Ticket (3-day streak) | 🎫 Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Green Light Week (7-day streak) | 🚦 Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Valet of the Month (30-day streak) | 🔑 Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version in Daily Brains.
- Weekday difficulty ramp from a 6×6 Monday to a 7×7 Sunday with bollards, a one-way ramp and a tow truck.
- 420 computer-solved lots (60 per weekday), BFS-verified par, no repeats for over a year.
- Drag, keyboard controls, undo, reset, paid hints, give-up replay, medals and a parking-ticket share card.