Hatstop

Hatstop is a bus-jam puzzle. The car park is packed, the crowd at the stop wants to go home, and every bus can only drive out the way its arrow points. Tap one: if nothing is in its way it pulls out, goes round the ring road and parks in one of five bays at the kerb, and the passenger at the front of the queue climbs aboard if it is their bus. A full bus honks and drives off.

The part that makes it Hatstop is the hats. Every crew in the queue wears its own — firefighters, royals, wizards, chefs and more — and its bus wears the same hat on the roof. You match hats, not colours, so nobody has to tell red from brown, and a glance at the queue tells you which bus to free next.

Five bays are all you get, and that is the whole puzzle: send a bus for a crew that is far down the queue and it sits in a bay you needed. Minibuses take four, buses six and coaches ten. From level 11 some buses are mystery buses, grey with a question mark, that show their crew only once their way out is clear; from level 31 some are asleep and wait until a number of others have left.

There are 500 levels in 25 districts, each car park a shape — a heart, a ring, a star, a diamond of buses turned on its side — and every one was built backwards, from the last bus out to the first, so none can ever be impossible. Three boosters help when it gets tight: VIP lifts any bus straight to a bay of its own, Sort lines the queue up again and +Bay opens another bay. Win without them for three stars. A new daily car park every day, the same for everyone, a daily gift, three daily tasks and five towns to buy with coins. It plays upright or sideways, in nine languages, and saves the moment anything happens.