Play Flood It — Free

What is Flood It?

Flood It is a color-flood logic puzzle played on a square grid of coloured cells. One corner — the top-left — is your home base, and the block of same-coloured cells connected to it is your "flood". Each turn you choose one of the six colours from the palette, and your entire flood instantly changes to that colour. The moment it does, it soaks up any neighbouring cells that were already showing the new colour, so the region you control grows a little larger. Repeat the process, colour by colour, and the flood spreads outward like spilled paint until — if you play well — every last cell on the board is the same colour.

What makes Flood It so moreish is that the rules take five seconds to learn yet the decisions run surprisingly deep. You have only a fixed number of moves to swallow the whole board, so grabbing the colour that looks biggest right now is rarely the smart play. The best players think like a chess player, reading a move or two ahead to see which colour unlocks the widest new frontier and which one leaves an awkward pocket stranded in a far corner. It is a calm, tactile puzzle you can enjoy for one quick round on a phone, and a genuine optimisation challenge when you start hunting for the fewest possible moves.

How to Play

The goal is simple, and only a couple of things count as a wasted turn or a loss. A move goes nowhere, or the round is lost, when:

• you pick the colour the flood already is — nothing new can be absorbed, so the turn is wasted;
• you spend a move that fails to reach a new region, adding no fresh cells to your flood;
• the game is over if you use every move and the board is still showing more than one colour.

Flood It Tips & Strategy

Flood It rewards planning far more than luck. These four ideas will turn a scramble of random taps into an efficient sweep that clears the board with moves to spare.

1. Greedy is fine to start, look-ahead wins

   The simplest tactic is greedy: each turn, pick the colour that adds the most new cells to your flood right now. It is a solid habit and gets you a long way, but it is not optimal. The stronger approach is to look one or two moves ahead — sometimes a colour that grabs fewer cells this turn opens a much wider frontier for the next one. Before you commit, quickly imagine the shape of your region after each candidate colour and choose the move that sets up the biggest follow-up, not just the biggest instant gain.

2. Work toward the dominant colour

   Glance across the whole board and notice which colour appears most often, especially in the areas you have not reached yet. If one colour blankets the far side of the grid, steer your flood so that you finish on that colour, mopping up the largest single group in one satisfying sweep. Saving the most common colour for a late move means one choice claims a huge chunk of cells at once, which is far more efficient than nibbling at it a few cells at a time throughout the game.

3. Push toward the far corners

   The hardest cells to capture are the ones farthest from your starting corner, so make reaching them a priority. If you flood only along one edge, the opposite corner can end up as a lonely pocket that costs you several extra moves to clean up at the very end. Try to expand on a broad diagonal front that advances toward the bottom-right, so your region touches as much of the board's perimeter as possible and no stranded island is left waiting when your moves are nearly gone.

4. Grow the frontier, not just the area

   Two moves can add the same number of cells yet leave you in very different positions. What really matters is the length of your border — the frontier where your flood meets cells you have not captured. A move that stretches your region into a long, jagged edge exposes it to more colours and more opportunities next turn than one that fills in a compact blob. When two colours look equally good by cell count, favour the one that leaves you touching the widest variety of colours, because options are what keep a run efficient.

How the Flood Fill Works

Under the hood, every turn of Flood It runs a single flood-fill from the top-left corner. The game looks at the colour your corner currently is, finds every cell connected to it through shared edges in that same colour, and repaints that whole connected region to the colour you chose. Because the newly painted cells now match any neighbours that already wore the chosen colour, those neighbours are effectively part of your region too — which is exactly why the flood appears to "grow" the instant you pick a matching colour. There is no hidden randomness in a move: the same board and the same colour choice always produce the same result.

This design is what makes the puzzle fast and fair. Each move touches every cell at most once, so even the largest board resolves instantly with no lag and no waiting. It also guarantees the game can never get stuck in a loop: your controlled region only ever stays the same size or gets bigger, and once it covers all the cells the board is by definition a single colour and you have won. That steady, one-directional growth is the heartbeat of Flood It — every colour you press either advances the flood or wastes a move, and reading which is which is the whole skill of the game.

Flood It vs Other Colour & Logic Puzzles

If you enjoy colour-matching brain games, Flood It sits in a happy middle ground between them. In a pipe-or-path puzzle like Color Connect you draw lines to link matching endpoints without crossing; in Water Sort you pour coloured layers between tubes until each holds a single colour; in a number-merge game like 2048 you combine matching tiles into bigger ones. Flood It shares their love of tidy, single-colour goals, but its move is unique — you never move a piece, you recolour a whole connected region at once and watch it snowball.

That single mechanic makes Flood It exceptionally easy to pick up yet hard to master. There are no pieces to drag, no lines to route and nothing to undo mid-move; there is only the question of which colour to press next, asked over and over with the board a little different each time. Play a few rounds and you will start seeing the grid the way strong players do — not as a field of colours but as a growing region and the frontier around it — which is precisely when a quick casual puzzle becomes a satisfying hunt for the perfect, fewest-moves solve.

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