Sort Puzzle: Daily Ball Sort

Tap a bottle to lift the colour on top of it, tap another to pour, and keep going until every colour has a bottle of its own. It is the puzzle you can explain in one sentence and then think about for twenty minutes.

A move lifts the whole group of same-coloured balls, and a colour can only land on its own colour or into an empty bottle. If the target has room for part of the group, the rest stays behind and it still costs one move, so where you pour matters as much as what.

EVERY BOARD CAN BE SOLVED. A ball sort dealt at random is unsolvable far more often than it looks, and being stuck through no fault of your own is the one thing a puzzle must never do. So these boards are never shuffled: each one is built backwards from the finished state, undoing pours one at a time, which means the path that made it is a path back out. You can still paint yourself into a corner, and that is the game, but the corner was yours.

DAILY RUN. The same ladder of boards for every player today, on the same budget of one hundred moves. Sort as many as you can: your score is what you cleared plus the moves you had left, so how far you got outranks how neatly you got there and neatness settles the ties. Undo costs a move here, which keeps the budget the thing you are actually spending.

FREE PLAY. The same ladder with no budget at all, undo and restart free, and your best level kept on your device.

The climb is real: one more colour every second level, face-down balls from level eight, and the second spare bottle taken away when you have earned the right to miss it.

Free, no sign-up, no timers, and the same game plays in a browser at brainpuzzles.games.

Recent changes:
First release. Tap a bottle to lift the colour on top, tap another to pour. Free to play.