Game Pile: Klotski
If you’re the right age, you might remember this old Windows 3.1 game, Klotski. Hypothetically, it’s based on an ancient genre of sliding block puzzles that may or may not date back to ‘Ancient China,’ which is typically a sign that the people writing the textbook have given up. I don’t know it by its supposedly more original name and turns out that a lot of the resources referring to it as Huorong Dao are in languages I don’t read.
It’s a block-sliding puzzle game that looks impossible at first, but you get it presented to you as if you can get the big central block out. It’s funny how, as a kid, I genuinely wasn’t sure if it was possible to solve. Think about that, there was a time when I thought it was very reasonable that someone would distribute a software package that literally could not do anything but let you play around and get frustrated with it a lot. I figured, because I couldn’t solve it, that the game was a program made to make people like me feel stupid and waste our time.
Don’t wanna talk to you about the mysterious origin of this game, though, want to talk to you about a table.
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