How to play Chowk Jam
A chowk is a crossroads. This one is jammed solid with rickshaws, cars, scooters and vans, all pointing different ways. You empty it one tap at a time — and the only thing you ever have to work out is which tap.
The rules
- Every vehicle has a nose, and it can only go the way its nose points. North, east, south or west. No reversing, no turning.
- Tap it and it drives off — if every cell between its nose and the edge of the board is empty. One tap, gone, out of the junction for good.
- Tap one whose lane is blocked and it lurches, stops, and costs you a heart. You have three.
- Clear every vehicle to clear the level.
Unlike a sliding-block traffic puzzle, nothing shuffles around. A vehicle is either still in the junction or gone. That means the board only ever gets emptier, which has a consequence worth spelling out.
You cannot get stuck. Ever.
Removing a vehicle frees cells; it never occupies one. So a move can never turn a solvable board into an unsolvable one, and every board in Chowk Jam is solvable by construction. There is no dead end, no unwinnable state, and nothing to undo yourself out of.
That is also why the hint button is honest and cheap: a hint is not the result of a search through possible futures, because there is no future in which you are trapped. It is simply a vehicle whose lane happens to be clear right now.
What you can lose is hearts. The entire difficulty of the game is reading a lane correctly before you commit, not planning a rescue.
How to read a lane
The rule is precise, and getting it exactly right is the whole skill:
- A vehicle needs every single cell from its nose to the board edge, in a straight line, to be empty. Not most of them.
- Its own body does not block it — a two-cell van is fine, the cells behind the nose travel with it.
- Concrete dividers do not move and never will. A lane running into one is permanently shut for that vehicle. The first divider appears at level 11, and by the last pack there are four of them on the board.
- The board edge behind a vehicle is irrelevant. Only the direction the nose points matters.
The order to clear a junction in
- Take the free ones first. Vehicles on the outer ring, pointing outwards, are almost always clear. They cost nothing to check and each one they leave behind opens a lane for something deeper in.
- Then look for the vehicle that is blocking the most others. Trace back from a long queue: the single vehicle at the head of it is usually worth more than three easy ones.
- Work opposite pairs. Two vehicles pointing at each other across a lane can both be stuck on the same third vehicle. Clear that one and you get two moves, not one.
- Save the middle for last. The centre of the junction is the most blocked place on the board, and it unjams itself as the edges empty.
When you genuinely cannot see a legal tap, do not guess — guessing costs a heart, and looking costs nothing. Sweep the outer ring again first; a lane usually opened up two taps ago and you did not notice.
Hearts, undo and hints
Three hearts per level. A blocked tap costs one; a clear tap costs nothing. Lose all three and the junction wins — and then you simply try it again, free, as many times as you like. There is no timer, no lives that refill on a clock and nothing to wait for.
Free play gives you one undo and one hint per level. Your star rating at the end is set by how few blocked taps you made, so a level cleared without a single wrong lane is a three-star level.
The sixty levels, in four packs
| Pack | Levels | Grid | Concrete dividers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gully Lane | 1–15 | 5 × 9 | 0, then 1 from level 11 |
| Market Chowk | 16–30 | 6 × 11 | 2 |
| Highway Merge | 31–45 | 6 × 11 | 3 |
| Festival Rush | 46–60 | 6 × 11 | 4 |
Three things ramp across those sixty levels: how densely the grid is packed, how many two-cell vehicles there are (a van blocks twice as much as a scooter), and how deep the lanes are that the generator prefers. Level 1 is a 5×9 grid a little under two-thirds full, with no dividers at all. Level 60 is a 6×11 grid packed around nine-tenths solid with four dividers in it.
Every grid is taller than it is wide on purpose — a board should fill the phone it is played on, not sit as a small square in the middle of it. And because levels are fixed seeds rather than random fills, level 37 is the same junction for every player, forever.
What is free and what is not
Levels 1 to 10 are free — no advertising, no account, nothing to install, and unlimited retries.
One optional payment unlocks all 60 levels plus unlimited hints and undo. It is charged once. There is no subscription and nothing is billed again. Buyers in India are quoted in rupees. Paddle.com Market Ltd is the merchant of record, and refunds run 14 days — see Refunds.
Questions
Do I need to download anything or sign up?
No. Chowk Jam runs in the browser tab you already have open. Nothing to install, no account, no email. Your progress is stored in your own browser.
Can a level be impossible?
No, and not by luck — by construction. Every board is generated solvable, and because removing a vehicle can only free cells, every position you can reach from it is solvable too. You can run out of hearts, but you can never reach a board with no legal tap on it.
Is this the same as a sliding traffic puzzle?
No. Nothing slides and nothing is nudged one cell at a time. A vehicle either has a clear lane to the edge and leaves the board entirely in one tap, or it does not. That makes it a reading puzzle rather than a manoeuvring puzzle.
What happens when I run out of hearts?
The level restarts, free, as many times as you want. Nothing is lost, nothing has to refill, and there is no timer.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes — it is built for a phone first, portrait, one thumb. It works with a mouse in a desktop browser too. There are no images or fonts to download.