Colour Sort
Pour the liquid between the jars until every jar holds one colour.
Tap a jar to pick it up, then tap another to pour into it. Nothing is rushed and a wrong move costs one click to undo — but a board can be played into a corner, and the page will say so if it is.
Adds a distinct shape to every colour, for telling them apart by more than hue.
How to play
How Colour Sort works
Colour Sort is a sorting puzzle with liquid in it. Every tube holds up to four units, and each colour appears exactly four times across the board, so every colour has one full tube it belongs in. Two tubes start empty — they are the working space the puzzle is solved with rather than spare colours, and knowing how to use them is most of the game.
A pour only ever moves the run of matching units sitting on top of a tube, and only onto a tube that is empty or already carries that colour on top. Everything underneath the run stays where it is, which is what makes this a puzzle rather than a tidying-up exercise: the order colours come free in matters, and a colour buried under two others has to be dug out before it can go anywhere.
- 1
Pick a tube up
Click or tap a tube with liquid in it. It lights up, and the top of it — the run of matching units — is what would move. Tapping the same tube again puts it back down, and tapping a different one changes which tube is held.
- 2
Pour it somewhere
Tap a second tube to pour into it. It has to be empty or carry the same colour on top, and it has to have room. The pour takes as many matching units as will fit, so a run of three poured into a tube with space for two leaves one unit behind.
- 3
Mind what you bury
A pour can only uncover what is above it, never what is below. Putting a colour on top of a tube that was nearly free is the mistake this puzzle is built around, so before you pour, look at what the receiving tube is hiding underneath.
- 4
Use the two empty tubes
They are the only place a colour can go when nothing else will take it. Pouring into an empty tube is never wasted, but it is not progress on its own either — it buys room, and room is what the puzzle is really made of.
- 5
Fill every tube
The puzzle is finished when every tube is either empty or holding four units of one colour. A tube with a single colour in it is not finished until it is full, so a colour spread across two tubes still has work left in it.
Things worth knowing
- Read what is under the top of each tube before you pour. Most stuck positions come from covering a colour that was one move from being free.
- Undo reverses a whole pour however many units it moved, so a wrong move costs a click rather than a restart.
- Moves are what the personal best is measured on, and time only breaks a tie between two results that took the same number of moves. A slower, tidier run beats a fast, scrappy one.
- Restart puts the same puzzle back to its starting position, which is worth doing when you want to try a different opening.
- Your best result at each difficulty is kept in your own browser, and each level also has its own public board. There is no account behind either.
Questions