💺 Bus Seat Sort

A seat-sorting puzzle on a bus

Bus Seat Sort is a calm, clever puzzle set inside a bus. Everyone has climbed aboard and sat down in completely the wrong place. Each passenger is wearing the colour of the seat they are supposed to be in, the red passengers want the red seats, the blue passengers want the blue ones, and your job is to get every single one of them into the right seat so the bus can leave.

The catch is that a bus is a tight space. Passengers can only walk along the aisle and through empty seats; they cannot climb over a seat or squeeze past another passenger. To get someone into the window seat at the back, you may need to move three other people out of the way first, and put them somewhere they will not block the next person. That is the whole puzzle, and it is surprisingly addictive.

How to play Bus Seat Sort

Tap a passenger to pick them up. Every seat and aisle spot they can reach turns green, so you can see straight away where they are able to go. Tap one of the green spots and the passenger walks there along the aisle. A green tick appears over anyone sitting in a seat of their own colour. When everybody has a tick, the bus pulls away and you can move on to the next level.

Grey seats belong to nobody. They are spare space, like the aisle itself, and they are the key to every level: park a passenger there for a moment while you clear the way for someone else.

Four kinds of bus and 60 levels

The first levels use a little minibus with two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other, a few passengers and plenty of spare seats. Then come city buses with two seats on each side, coaches with three seats on one side and two on the other, and coaches with a long back bench right across the rear of the bus, where the middle seat can only be reached from the aisle. As you progress there are more colours, more passengers, fewer spare seats and passengers standing in the aisle at the start, blocking the way.

Every level is made by taking a perfectly sorted bus and shuffling the passengers around with real, legal moves, so every level can always be solved. The number of shuffling moves is the level's par. Sort the bus in par moves or fewer without using Undo for three stars; within one and a half times par for two stars.

Endless mode

In Endless, one bus follows another, each a little harder than the last. Sort a bus and the next one pulls in straight away. Your best run is saved as your Endless record.

Tips for sorting a bus

Start with the passengers who are easiest to place: someone in the aisle who can walk straight into their own seat is a free move. Fill seats from the inside out: a window seat is easy to reach while the aisle seat next to it is empty, but impossible once someone sits there. Keep at least one spare seat or aisle spot free, because a bus with no free space at all is stuck. And think about the order: moving one passenger to the wrong place now can open the way for three others.

Colour symbols, undo and keyboard play

Turn on Show colour symbols before you start and every passenger and seat also gets a shape (circle, triangle, square, diamond, star, heart and cross), so the puzzle works for colour-blind players too. Undo takes back as many moves as you like, and Restart puts everyone back where they started. You can also play with the keyboard: the arrow keys move a yellow cursor around the bus, Enter or Space picks a passenger up and puts them down, Z undoes and R restarts.

Who is Bus Seat Sort for?

The early minibus levels are gentle enough for children of about six who are new to puzzles: there are only a few passengers, lots of spare seats and every reachable spot lights up green, so it is easy to see what a move will do. The later coach levels, with a full back bench, people standing in the aisle and hardly a spare seat in sight, are a real challenge for teenagers and adults. Because there is no timer, nobody is rushed, and Undo means a mistake is never the end of a level.

Sorting puzzles like this are good practice for planning ahead. To seat one passenger you often have to think three or four moves forward: who has to step out, where they can wait without blocking anyone, and who goes back in first. That is the same kind of step-by-step thinking used in maths and coding, wrapped in a bus full of colourful passengers.

Short levels for short breaks

Most buses take a minute or two to sort, which makes Bus Seat Sort a good pick for a quick break between lessons or homework. Your stars are saved automatically, so you can stop after any level and come back to it later.

Stars and new buses

Stars unlock new buses to sort: a yellow School Bus, a Red Double-Decker and a purple Party Bus with a dark floor. There are 180 stars to collect, three for every level.

Free, safe and made for every device

Bus Seat Sort works in any modern browser on computers, Chromebooks, tablets and phones, with a tall layout on small screens. There are no adverts inside the game, no accounts, no chat and nothing to buy, and your stars are saved only on your device. See the Parents & Safety page for more.

More bus puzzles

Sort a whole crowd onto buses of the right colour in Bus Jam, or slide the traffic out of the way in Rush Hour Bus. Every bus game is on the Bus Games page, and more brain teasers are on the Puzzle Games page.

Frequently asked questions