Caboodle was conceived by Stephen Sniderman.

You are given a board with colored disks, six each in six colors, (red, blue, yellow, green, black, and purple), mixed up. There is also one empty space, shown in white.

The objective is to rearrange the disks so that each color forms a contiguous group - of any shape. (The goal is not unique.)

You reach the goal by making individual moves.

A move is made by clicking a disk to move it to the empty spot ... but you can only move a disk if it is in a direct line (at any distance in either the horizontal or one of the two diagonal directions) with the empty spot.

The diagram at the right shows an example where any of the 16 numbered disks can jump directly to the empty spot (highlighted in blue).

There are two ways to start:

• Random game gives you a new random starting position which may be of any possible level of difficulty, and which typically requires 30, 40, or more moves to organize.
  
  
• 24 Moves game gives you a new starting position which is guaranteed to be solvable in at most 24 moves, but often requires fewer.

Same again restarts from the previous starting position. It can be used at any time, whether the goal has been reached or not.

When the goal is reached, the number of moves and time taken is reported.

For a bit of the underlying mathematics, see Caboodle Math page.