Sort Puzzle

How to play sort puzzle

1. Tap a bottle to lift the whole group of same-coloured blocks sitting on top of it.
2. Tap another bottle to pour. A colour can only land on the same colour or into an empty bottle.
3. If the target has room for part of the group, the rest stays behind. It still counts as one move.
4. A bottle is finished when it holds four blocks of one colour, and a finished bottle stays that way.
5. From level eight the blocks under the top start face down. They turn over the moment they reach the top, and a bottle holding one cannot be finished.
6. Sort every bottle and the next board is dealt, one colour harder every second level.

Why the daily run is the same for everyone

The daily takes its boards from the date, so every player today gets the same ladder in the same order with the same budget of one hundred moves. That is what makes the board worth looking at: a leaderboard filled with randomly dealt runs compares luck rather than play. Your score is one hundred points for every board you sort plus the moves you had left, so how far you got always outranks how neatly you got there, and neatness settles the ties. Undo costs a move in the daily and is free in free play, which keeps the budget the thing you are actually spending.

Every board can be solved

A ball sort board dealt at random is unsolvable far more often than it looks, and being stuck through no fault of your own is the one thing a puzzle must never do. So these boards are never shuffled. Each one is built backwards from the finished state, undoing pours one at a time, which means the path that made it is a path back out. You can still paint yourself into a corner, and that is the game, but the corner was yours.

More free puzzles at BrainPuzzles

In the mood for something else? Drop shapes into a grid in block puzzle, fill a grid of numbers in sudoku, hunt hidden words in our word search puzzles, or clear a board of mahjong tiles.