First: is it hard, or is it already lost?
These are different problems with different answers. Run through this quickly:
| What you see | Diagnosis | Best response |
|---|---|---|
| No legal pours at all | Hard deadlock | Undo, or restart if the mistake was several moves back |
| Legal pours exist but none change anything | Effectively lost — you can shuffle but not isolate a colour | Undo to the last branch point, or use the extra bottle |
| One empty bottle, several colours at three fragments | Tight but usually playable | Consolidate free merges first, then plan before spending space |
| Plenty of space, no obvious move | Not hard, just unfamiliar | Pick a colour, choose its home bottle, work backwards |
On this site the hint button answers the first question directly: it either gives you a real next move or tells you the position cannot be solved any more. That is worth knowing before you spend ten minutes on a dead board.
The recovery order
- Undo first, and more than once. Step back to the last point where you had a genuine choice, not just one move.
- Re-read the board as if it were new. Fragment counts and free space, in that order. Your old plan is what got you here.
- Take every free consolidation. Whole-block merges cost nothing and often reveal a move you could not see.
- Then, and only then, consider the extra bottle. It is a legitimate tool, but it changes the puzzle rather than solving it.
- Restart if the position is more than a few pours past the mistake. You keep the understanding and lose nothing else.
Rebuilding a plan that fits your space
On a tight board, plan from the constraint rather than from the opportunity. Find the deepest buried unit — the one with the most different colours stacked above it — and count how many parking places those covering units need. That number is the real difficulty of the level.
If you need three parking places and hold four free units spread over two colours, check that each covering unit can actually reach one of them: space on top of yellow is useless to a green unit. This is the space accounting check from the techniques page, and it is the single most useful calculation on a hard board.
When the count does not work out
You have three options: find a chain that empties a bottle first (buying universal space), change which bottle you intend as the colour's home, or accept the extra bottle. Guessing and pouring is not on the list.
Specific situations that feel impossible
Every bottle shows a different colour
With one empty bottle you have exactly one move type available: park a unit. Choose the unit that exposes a colour matching another bottle's top, so your next move is a free merge rather than another park. Choosing the wrong unit here is what turns a tight board into a dead one.
Two colours are interleaved in two bottles
A classic shape: bottle A is green, pink, green, pink and bottle B is the mirror. You cannot untangle this without a third place, and one empty bottle is enough only if you alternate correctly — park one pink, merge the exposed greens, then return the pink onto its own colour. Work the sequence out fully before the first pour.
One colour is buried under three different colours
This needs three separate parking places, which almost never exist as raw empty space. The answer is to create them in stages: finish another colour first to free a whole bottle, then start the dig. Digging before you have the space is the most common way hard levels are lost.
Practise on the hard tier
Levels 21 to 30 in the browser game use seven or eight colours with a single spare bottle, which produces exactly these situations. Every one of them is verified solvable before it loads, so if you are stuck the answer exists — and the level walkthroughs show a complete solution line for the ones people ask about most.