Parking Tangle

Parking Tangle is a parking-jam puzzle with an actual puzzle underneath it. The lot is full, everybody wants to leave at once, and you tap a car to send it driving out the way its nose points. If the lane is clear to a gap in the kerb, it is gone. If it is not, it drives up to whatever stopped it, knocks into it and parks there — which costs you a move and is usually the whole point, because it frees the bays it came from, and those bays are what the car in the next lane was waiting for.

There is nothing to match and no colour to decode to get out. The lot is walled in with concrete blocks, chained bollards, boom gates and wheel stops, and any car fits through any gap. What you are reading is space, not colour: which lane empties first, and what the emptying leaves behind.

Two things belong to this game and to no other one in the genre. The first is the people at the kerb — small groups waiting outside some of the openings, each group in one of the car colours, worth two hundred points a head. Send them a car of their colour and the whole group piles in. Send them the wrong one and it drives straight past them. Which gap you aim a car at stops being obvious the moment they appear.

The second is pedestrians inside the lot. Drive over one of your own colour and you pick them up; any other colour blocks you as solidly as a wall. Dogs match everything, guards match nothing, and children hide behind a parent until the parent is collected. They step once per move, so they are not random — you can plan around them, and planning around them is most of what the later worlds ask.

Nine kinds of vehicle break the rules in nine directions. Taxis only leave through the bottom. Fire trucks are two bays long and can never reverse. Ambulances hand a move back. Ice cars take two taps. Tow trucks drag the car behind them out as well. And police cars never move at all — they are scenery, and you clear the lot around them.

Two hundred levels across ten worlds, from a four-by-seven lot up to twelve-by-twelve with forty-odd cars in it. Every level is built so that it cannot be unsolvable and then re-solved and replayed by a verifier through the same rules the game uses, so a level that ships is a level somebody — something — has finished. Twelve kinds of objective rotate through them, and levels ten and twenty of every world are a boss. On top of that: a daily challenge seeded by the date, a weekly gauntlet, an endless mode that never stops getting busier, and prestige when you have finished the lot.

It is built portrait-first for a phone, it makes no network request of any kind once it has loaded, and it keeps what you have done in your own browser. No account, no ads, nothing to buy.