Strategy guides › Ferry
How to solve Ferry: read the first move off the legend, then plan the trip back
▶ Play Ferry🎯 Try a river where both rowers have to come back together
A farmer, a fox, a hen and a sack of grain wait at a river. The boat holds the farmer and one more. Leave the fox with the hen and the hen is gone; leave the hen with the grain and the grain is gone. People have been telling this puzzle for well over a thousand years, and the answer is always the same seven crossings.
Ferry deals a new one every day. The cast changes, the boat may have two seats or three, sometimes the child can row and sometimes only Gran can, and the guards change too: on some days the dog keeps the hen away from the grain as well as any farmer could. You can’t learn one answer by heart. What you can learn is how these puzzles are put together. Everything below was measured by running the game’s own solver over 400 rivers per level.
The two rules the boat checks
Every crossing is checked twice: once for the bank the boat leaves, once for the bank it reaches. A pair from the legend may share a bank only while one of its guards is there too. The boat counts as part of the bank it is tied up at, so a farmer sitting in the boat at the far bank still guards the far bank.
If a crossing would break a rule on either bank, the boat refuses to go. The pair shakes, the rule on the legend lights up, and the crossing is not counted. That is on purpose. A refusal costs you nothing, so poking at the rules is free, and it tells you which bank was the problem. Most players forget to check the far bank.
The first move is almost always forced
This is the most useful thing the solver showed us. On 86% of Normal rivers exactly one first crossing is legal at all. On Easy it is 76%. Before you tap anything, go through the legend and ask, for each possible first load, what it leaves behind. Usually only one load leaves the near bank safe.
Then do the same on the way back. In the practice river, no position on the par route offers more than three legal crossings, and one of them is always just undoing your last move. A good river is less a maze than a corridor with one or two real forks. The skill is finding them.
Somebody always has to ride back
The classic answer has a twist in the middle: the farmer takes the hen back. That isn’t a quirk of the old puzzle. We ran the solver a second time with one extra rule, that only rowers may sit in the boat on the way back. Then we checked whether any river could still be crossed in par.
None of the 400 Normal rivers could. Every single one needs at least one passenger who can’t row to ride back across the river. On Hard it was 99%, on Easy 90%. So when you are stuck, the move you are missing is almost always a return trip with company. Look for the passenger who is safe on the near bank but a problem on the far bank, and take them home for a while.
The passenger who makes the extra trip
In the old puzzle the hen is in both rules, and the hen is the one who crosses three times. The same pattern holds in Ferry. On Easy, when one passenger is in more rules than any other (87% of Easy rivers), that passenger is on the first crossing every time, and it rides back at least once every time.
On Normal and Hard, ties are common: with four rules the conflicts often spread evenly. But the idea still helps. A passenger with two rules has two ways to cause trouble on any bank. Get it moving early, and plan where it waits while the others go over.
Guards beyond the people matter too. On Normal, 54% of rivers have a rule that the dog can guard. A dog left on the far bank is a free guard, so park it next to the pair it protects.
When both rowers row back
This position is the trap in the practice river. It feels wrong to send both rowers back and leave the far bank to one animal. But a bank with one passenger on it can never break a rule, because every rule needs a pair. Lone passengers are the safest thing on the river. If you can’t find a safe return, look for one that leaves a single passenger behind.
How long a river should take
Par is always odd: everyone ends on the far bank, so the boat does too, and a boat that starts on the near bank and ends on the far one has crossed an odd number of times. On Normal, par was 7 on 36% of rivers, 9 on 50% and 11 on the remaining 14%. Easy is 5 or 7; Hard runs from 11 to 17, with 13 the most common. Every rule on the legend matters: when a river is made, the solver checks that dropping any one rule would make it shorter, and rivers where a rule changes nothing are thrown away.
Practice
Seed 104 has two rowers, three rules and a par of 11. Start with the only good first crossing, child + cabbage. Then look for the moment when both people have to row back together. In the solver’s route the cabbage crosses three times. When a bank won’t stay safe, take somebody home.
▶ Play Ferry🎯 Try a river where both rowers have to come back together
