Play Water Sort — Free

What is Water Sort?

Water Sort is a calm, colour-sorting logic puzzle played with a row of tall glass tubes. Each tube can hold up to four stacked segments of coloured liquid, and at the start the colours are jumbled — a splash of red might sit on top of blue, which sits on green, which sits on red again, all mixed across the tubes. Two spare tubes begin empty to give you room to work. Your single goal is beautifully simple to state: keep pouring until every tube is either empty or completely filled with one colour and one colour only. There are no timers forcing your hand and no score ticking down, just you and the puzzle.

Although the rules take ten seconds to learn, Water Sort rewards genuine planning. You can only ever move the top block of a colour, and only onto an empty tube or onto matching liquid that still has space, so every pour changes what is reachable next. The fun comes from thinking a few moves ahead: emptying a tube to open up workspace, gathering scattered segments of the same colour into one home, and untangling the stack in the right order so you never trap a colour beneath another. It is the kind of relaxing brain game you can dip into for one quick level or lose half an hour to while you chase a tidy, low-move solution.

How to Play

The pouring rule is the whole game, and there are only a few ways a move is blocked. A pour is not allowed when:

• the source tube is empty — there is nothing on top to pour;
• the destination's top segment is a different colour from the liquid you are pouring;
• the destination tube is already full to the top with no room to receive anything.

Water Sort Tips & Strategy

Water Sort looks effortless, but a messy order of pours can leave you stuck with colours buried in the wrong tubes. These four techniques keep your options open and shrink your move count.

1. Free up an empty tube early

   An empty tube is the most valuable thing on the board because it can receive any colour. Whenever you can consolidate two partly filled tubes of the same colour into one, do it — clearing a tube back to empty gives you a workspace to park an awkward segment while you dig out the colour trapped underneath it. Players who guard at least one open tube almost never get stuck; players who fill everything to the brim usually do.

2. Always pour the biggest matching run

   When the top of one tube shows three reds and another tube has a single red with room to spare, moving all three at once is far more efficient than trickling them across in separate pours. Because the game transfers the entire matching run as long as it fits, lining up a large pour collapses several would-be moves into one. Fewer, bigger pours is exactly how you beat your previous best on a level.

3. Finish one colour before starting another

   It is tempting to shuffle a bit of everything, but scattering half-sorted colours across many tubes clogs your workspace fast. Pick a colour that already has a strong majority sitting in one tube and commit to completing it — pour every stray segment of that colour home until its tube is full and locked. A finished tube is out of your way for good, and each one you close makes the remaining tangle simpler to read.

4. Read the whole board before the first pour

   Before touching anything, scan for colours that are only ever buried under one other colour — those are your easy wins and should usually go first. Note which tube you intend to make each colour's final home, then work backwards to see what has to move out of the way. A few seconds of planning stops you from pouring a colour into a spot you will only have to empty again two moves later.

How Pouring & Solvability Work

Every pour in Water Sort follows one mechanic: the game looks at the top of the tube you picked up, counts how many segments of that same colour sit together in a run, and moves as many of them as will fit onto the destination. If the destination is empty the whole run can go; if it already holds two of that colour and has room for two more, only two travel and the rest wait their turn. That is why the order of your moves matters so much — the same set of tubes can be trivial or infuriating depending on which colour you free first, because each pour changes what the tops of the other tubes expose next.

Solvability is guaranteed by the way levels are built rather than by any luck. The game starts from a perfectly sorted board — every colour already gathered into its own full tube, plus the empty spares — and then applies a fixed, bounded number of reverse pours that scramble it. Because each scrambling step is the exact mirror image of a legal pour, replaying those steps in reverse is always a valid solution. There is no searching, guessing or solver involved, so a level can never be generated in an impossible state. If a board ever feels hopeless, it is not: step back with Undo, try freeing a different tube first, and a clean path will open up.

Levels, Moves & Your Best Score

You begin with six tubes and four colours, an approachable warm-up that teaches the pouring rule without much clutter. Clear it and the next level nudges the challenge upward, adding more colours and more tubes as you climb so the tangle deepens gradually. More colours mean more ways for segments to end up buried, which is where the planning tips above start to pay real dividends. The level counter at the top of the board tracks how far you have travelled, and each new board is freshly scrambled, so you will never memorise your way through.

Because there is no timer, Water Sort scores you on elegance instead of speed: the move counter rises by one every time liquid actually changes tubes, and your fewest-moves finish is saved for each difficulty tier in your browser. That turns every board into a two-part game — first solve it at all, then come back and solve it in fewer pours. The Restart button reloads the exact same layout so you can attempt a tidier run, while New game deals a fresh scramble at your current difficulty. Undo steps back through your entire move history one pour at a time, so experimenting is completely safe and nothing is ever lost.

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