Daily Sokoban

Daily Sokoban gives the Sokoban specialist one date-stable box-pushing puzzle each day without changing the platform’s frozen Today’s 6. The same local calendar date produces the same difficulty, verified source and geometric transformation. If you leave partway through, the exact player square, box positions, move counts and timer state are restored from local storage.

One verified puzzle for the date

The Daily mode does not download a new level from a remote service. It feeds the date into the same deterministic selection system used by seeded Practice. That selection chooses a source from the frozen 45-puzzle bank and applies one of eight rotations or reflections. Because every source and every symmetry has a replayable verified solution, Daily never depends on an untested random box arrangement.

The difficulty rhythm intentionally favors Standard. Its six-day cycle is Standard, Easy, Standard, Easy, Standard, Challenge. Over the 365 dates of 2026 that produces 183 Standard days, 122 Easy days and 60 Challenge days. Difficulty selection is deterministic, so reloading the same date cannot quietly replace a difficult board with another one.

What the Daily benchmark means

The benchmark is the exact minimum number of box pushes from the starting position. It is not the reference path length and it is not a fabricated target score. The source-bank minimum was found independently using a breadth-first search over push states. Rotating or reflecting the board preserves the structure of the problem, so it also preserves that minimum push count.

Walking moves are still tracked because they describe how the puzzle was actually played. Two players can both solve in the minimum number of pushes but take different routes around the boxes. Daily history therefore records pushes, total movement steps and active elapsed time separately.

Daily history and streak

When the puzzle is completed, the browser adds a record for that date to the Sokoban specialist history. The record keeps the difficulty, box count, pushes, total moves, benchmark, active time and whether a solver Hint was used. The specialist streak advances only from its own prior-date history.

This record is separate from Today’s 6. Completing Daily Sokoban does not fill a slot in the main six-game set, does not add to the 6,000-point Daily Score, and does not modify the frozen twelve-game source rotation. That containment lets the platform add strong specialist Daily loops without rewriting past Daily behavior.

Autosave is especially important in Sokoban

A Sokoban position can contain several minutes of route planning, so losing the exact box layout would be frustrating. Every valid movement updates a local autosave containing player position, box positions, movement and push counts, Undo history, Assisted state and elapsed active time. Reopening the same dated puzzle restores that saved position when the same browser storage is available.

The timer counts active play rather than wall-clock time. Pressing Pause stops it. Hiding the page also stops it until the page becomes active again. This prevents a Daily solve from appearing artificially slow simply because the user switched tabs or locked the device.

Using Undo and Hint on a Daily board

Undo is unlimited within the stored history and reverses one movement step. It is part of normal exploration and does not by itself mark the result Assisted. Restart returns to the deterministic initial board for that date, so you can try another plan without receiving a different puzzle.

Hint runs the solver from the current position. If a box has already been pushed into a simple non-goal corner, the game warns about that deadlock first. Otherwise, when a verified continuation is found, Hint identifies the next useful push. Because that is solver-provided information, a final result after a Hint is marked Assisted rather than pretending it was an unaided solve.

Why Sokoban works as a Daily puzzle

The rules are stable but the planning problem changes sharply with box placement. A short board can still require looking several pushes ahead because the player must repeatedly reach the correct side of a box. A Daily board is therefore compact enough to revisit while still giving the date a meaningful identity.

The fixed date also makes restarting useful. You can compare a first solution with a cleaner attempt on the exact same starting state. Matching minimum pushes is a concrete goal because the benchmark is proved. Reducing walking moves after that is a secondary route-efficiency challenge rather than a claim about intelligence or cognitive ability.

Mobile and keyboard play

Daily Sokoban supports arrow keys and WASD, a large on-screen direction pad, and tap-to-walk on reachable floor cells. Tapping a box while standing next to it attempts the push. The interaction keeps the full movement count honest even when the interface helps you cross an open room with one tap.

The board scales to a narrow phone viewport without horizontal overflow. Easy uses a 7×7 map and the larger modes use 8×8. Walls, goals, boxes and the player remain distinct without relying on tiny text labels. Keyboard shortcuts include Ctrl/Cmd+Z for Undo, P for Pause and H for Hint.

Reproducibility and local limits

The Daily contract can be enumerated for an entire year during QA. The verifier checks that all 365 dates produce deterministic, structurally valid boards and that every board’s stored transformed reference reaches a solved position using the exact source push minimum. This is stronger than relying on a visible “Solved” banner as proof.

All history remains browser-local in this public build. There is no account, global leaderboard or cloud backup. Clearing storage can remove the Daily archive and streak. The site also does not turn a Sokoban result into an IQ, percentile, attention, intelligence, diagnosis or health claim.