The objective
Finish with every bottle holding one colour only, or holding nothing at all. Each bottle takes four units of liquid, and each colour appears exactly four times, so a finished colour fills one bottle completely.
Controls
- Touchscreen (Android phone, iPhone, tablet): tap the bottle you want to pour from — it lifts slightly — then tap the bottle you want to pour into.
- Mouse: click the source bottle, then the target bottle. Clicking the lifted bottle again cancels the selection.
- Keyboard: every bottle is a button. Tab to move between them and press Enter or Space to select and pour.
- Undo steps back one pour at a time. Extra bottle adds one empty bottle per level. Restart rebuilds the same level from scratch.
How the puzzle works
Liquid only ever leaves from the top of a bottle. When you pour, the entire block of matching colour on top moves at once — if three yellow units sit on top and the target has room for two, exactly two move and one stays behind. This is why the order of your pours matters far more than the number of pours: a colour buried under others is frozen until you find somewhere to put what is above it.
A legal pour needs two things to be true at the same time: the target is empty or shows the same colour on top, and the target has at least one free unit. Nothing else is allowed, and nothing is hidden from you — the full board is visible at all times, so every puzzle is a pure logic problem with no luck involved.
Rules in brief
- Pour only from the top of a bottle.
- The target must be empty, or match the colour you are pouring.
- A bottle never holds more than four units.
- Never pour out of a bottle you have already completed.
- There is no move limit and no timer.
The full rules page covers the edge cases — partial pours, empty bottles and what counts as a dead position.
Five beginner tips for this board
- Before your first pour, count how many separate places each colour appears. Start with the colour that is split into the fewest pieces.
- Treat empty bottles as the scarcest resource on the board. An empty bottle can accept any colour; once it has something in it, it can only accept one.
- Prefer a pour that empties a bottle completely over one that merely tidies two bottles.
- Avoid dropping a single unit into a large empty bottle unless it unlocks a colour immediately underneath.
- If two pours look equally good, make the one that leaves more free space afterwards.
For a longer version of this with worked examples, read the beginner's guide and strategy guide.
Strategy, in one paragraph
Strong play is mostly about keeping options open. Every pour changes two things: how many free units remain on the board, and how many distinct colours are exposed on tops. Good pours reduce the number of fragments a colour is split into without using up an empty bottle; weak pours burn an empty bottle to move one unit. When a board has only one spare bottle left, stop and look for a chain of pours that ends with a bottle completely empty again before you commit. The techniques page names and explains these patterns.
Troubleshooting
- Nothing happens when I tap a bottle. Empty bottles cannot be a source, and finished bottles are locked on purpose. The message under the board says which case you hit.
- "Not a legal pour". The target either has a different colour on top or is already full.
- "No legal pours left". The board is deadlocked. Undo, add the extra bottle, or restart.
- Cleared levels disappeared. Progress lives in your browser storage; clearing site data or switching browsers resets it.
- The page looks unstyled or the board will not load. A hard refresh usually fixes it. If it persists, tell us which browser and device you use.
Questions about the browser game
Yes. Each level is built from a fixed seed and then checked by a solver before it is shown. If the solver cannot finish it, the board is discarded and another is generated, so you never face an impossible start.
You can still make a board unsolvable by your own pours — that is part of the puzzle. Undo, extra bottle and restart are there for exactly that situation.
The hint runs the same solver on your current board and tells you the first move of a genuine solution from that position. It is not a guess or a random legal pour.
If the solver reports that your position cannot be solved any more, the hint tells you that instead, which is your signal to undo or add a bottle.
Levels you complete are stored in your browser's local storage on that device, which is why cleared levels stay green when you come back. Clearing site data or using a different device or browser starts the list fresh.
There is no account and no server-side profile.
Rotate to portrait and the bottles wrap into rows that fit the width. On very small screens the bottles scale down automatically.
If a pour does not register, tap the bottle body rather than the neck — the whole bottle is one large touch target, at least 44 pixels wide.
This page is a browser version built for the site so you can play and follow our guides without installing anything. It has 30 levels and the core tools.
The Android app by Galaxy Studio is a separate, much larger product with its own level set and features. Details are on its Google Play listing.
Prefer to play on Android?
Galaxy Studio also publishes a full Water Sort Puzzle app for Android with a much larger level set. You can see the details and current information on its Google Play listing. The browser demo above uses the supplied game's original seven level files and needs no install.