Rules
Hints and lives
Sokoban-Lettres never locks you out of a level, but help has to be earned. Undoing a move and asking for a hint each cost a life, and every player receives three a day. Here is exactly how lives, the three hints and running out of lives work.
Three lives a day
Each player has three lives. They are restored once a day, when the date changes in Coordinated Universal Time (midnight UTC). Lives are stored in your browser.
A life is spent when you undo a move, when you ask for one of the three hints, and when you choose to undo from the blocked-position window. Playing a level, failing it, or resetting the grid costs nothing: a level can be restarted as often as you like.
Three increasingly precise hints
All three hints are about the same box: the misplaced box closest to Sokko. Its target is the first free target waiting for the same letter.
Crate
The box and its target are highlighted for ten seconds. It is the lightest hint: it tells you which letter to start with, without revealing anything permanently.
Target
On top of the highlight, the letter on the box and the letter of its target stay visible until the end of the level. This hint is most useful in the difficulty modes that hide letters.
Path
On top of what the Target hint shows, arrows indicate the sequence of pushes that brings the box onto its target. That route is calculated with the other boxes treated as fixed, and it avoids corners and two-by-two squares. It shows one possible route for this box, not the full solution of the level.
When lives run out
- With no lives left, the game offers to watch a rewarded ad. If you watch it to the end, the undo or hint is granted.
- If no ad is available — ad blocker, no network, no ad to serve — the game grants a fallback hint. There is one per day.
- If today’s fallback hint has already been used, the game simply says so: no help is available until the next day.
A “+1 life” button also lets you win back a life in exchange for a rewarded ad, up to a maximum of three. Watching an ad is always optional: declining has no consequence other than not receiving the reward.
Players without ads play normally
The game is designed so that an ad blocker penalises no one. An unavailable ad is never treated as a refusal: it costs neither your daily streak nor the current offer. Its only effect is to fall back on the fallback hint sooner.
Using hints without missing out
Three lives a day are plenty if you get into the habit of resetting rather than undoing a long string of moves. Hints are more useful at the start of a level, to choose the right first letter, than at the end. The advanced strategies and the page on deadlocks help you need them less.