Water Sort Puzzle Strategy: Sort Every Color in Fewer Pours (2026)

1. Read the board before you pour

Water Sort is not a speed game; it is a search. Before your first pour, count three things on the level you just loaded: how many colours there are (3, 4 or 5), how many spare empty glasses you have (one on easy/medium, two on hard), and which colour appears in the fewest glasses. The colour that is most scattered is the one that will cost you moves, so it is the one to plan around first. The par number in the HUD is the least number of pours a solver found; treat it as a target, not a promise that your first idea is right.

2. The empty glass is your only buffer — protect it

Every legal pour needs somewhere to go. With only one spare glass on most levels, that glass is the single place you can park a colour while you work on another. The most common way to stall is to fill the spare with a colour you were "just moving out of the way" and then discover you have nowhere left to pour. Rule of thumb: the spare stays empty unless you are in the middle of an active pour sequence, and you empty it again as soon as you can. On hard levels you have two spares; that does not mean you can waste them — it means you can keep one as a true buffer while the other is in use.

3. Pour whole runs, never single units

A pour does not move one unit; it moves the entire top run of matching colour, up to the free space in the target. That is the lever the whole game is built on, and using it deliberately is the difference between a 9-move solve and a 25-move mess. Before you pour, check how many units will actually move: if the source has three reds on top and the target has one free space, you will move one red and leave two behind, which usually makes things worse. Only pour when the run size fits the free space, or when you are deliberately splitting a run to free a buried colour. If the numbers do not line up, change the target, not the source.

4. Free buried colours by emptying from the top

A colour trapped under another colour cannot be sorted until the colour above it moves. Work top-down: empty a glass completely before you start filling it with its final colour, because a half-full glass of mixed colours is a dead end. The cleanest sequence is to pour the top colour of a mixed glass into a glass that already holds that colour (or the spare), repeating until the glass is empty, then fill it with one colour from the bottom up. Never start a new colour in a glass that still contains a different colour underneath — you will bury it and pay for it later.

5. Sort the most constrained colour first

When two colours are both loose, sort the one that has the fewest free landing spots first. A colour that only fits in one glass must go there now, before that glass gets claimed by something else; a colour with several options can wait. This is the water-sort version of "tight clues first": resolve the forced moves, then let the remaining moves fall out. If you find yourself with two colours and one glass, you have already made an earlier pour that closed off an option — undo and try a different order.

6. Use par and undo as tools, not scoreboards

The par is the solver's best move count, not a requirement. Beating it is a bonus; finishing every level is the goal, and every level was verified to be solvable. Undo steps back one pour and the move counter with it, so exploring a branch and reverting costs nothing — use it aggressively when a plan stops working, and restart the level freely. The only thing that costs is committing to a pour you have not checked against the rule in section 3. Re-check, then pour.

7. Climb the three tiers

The library has three tiers, ordered by colour count and spare count, not by a hidden trick.

• Easy (4 levels, 3 colours, 1 spare, par 6): small enough to plan the whole level in your head. Practise reading top runs and protecting the spare here.
• Medium (4 levels, 4 colours, 1 spare, par 9/9/12/9): the extra colour removes the slack. The "sort the constrained colour first" habit from section 5 starts to matter, and one wrong early pour usually forces a restart.
• Hard (3 levels, 5 colours, 2 spares, par 14 each): more colours, more glasses, and the par is honest about it. Expect to use both spares at once and to undo more. The mechanics never change — capacity 4, same pour rule, same solve condition — so difficulty is purely how long the chains are.

Move up a tier only when you can finish the current one without using Undo on every level. The rules are identical in all three; only the search space grows.

FAQ

How is this different from the rules on the game page?

The game page explains how to operate the glasses — tap a glass to lift it, tap another to pour, tap the same glass to put it down; Undo steps back one pour; Restart reloads the level; the arrows move between levels; the HUD shows the level, your move count, the par and how many colours are sorted; full single-colour glasses carry a check mark. This guide assumes you know that and plays the layer above it: reading top runs, protecting the spare, moving whole runs, freeing buried colours, choosing which colour to sort first, and using par and undo well. Read the rules first, then work the strategy.

Can every level really be finished?

Yes. All eleven levels were checked by an offline solver before release and each was confirmed solvable and non-trivial (minimum 3 pours). There are no levels that require a guess; every one has a route from the starting position that reaches the solve condition under the pour rule. If you feel stuck, you have closed off an option with an earlier pour, not hit a wall — undo to the point where the spare was still free and try a different order.

What does the par number mean?

Par is the least number of pours the solver found for that level. It is a target to aim at, not a requirement: finishing the level is the win condition, and the win message reports your move count against par. Beating par is a sign that your search order is good; missing it by a few moves is normal and costs nothing.

When should I use Undo versus Restart?

Undo when the last pour or two created the problem — it steps back one pour and restores the move count, so a short detour is cheap. Restart when the spare is full and you cannot see a clean way to empty it; reloading the level is instant and keeps you in the same level. Neither is a failure: both are the intended way to explore branches in a search problem.

How do the three tiers differ?

By colour count and spare count, not by a new rule. Easy is 3 colours with one spare glass; medium is 4 colours with one spare; hard is 5 colours with two spares. The mechanics — capacity 4, the pour rule, the solve condition, Undo, Restart — are identical in all three. Move up a tier when you can finish the current one without restarting every level.

Where can I play it?

Right on this site's Water Sort Puzzle page. The mechanic — pour matching top colours between glasses until each colour is sorted into its own glass — has no single author, so this build is written from scratch by Playnesta with no byte-reused game files: the rules engine (js/main.js: the pour rules applyPour/canPour/isSolved, the level loader, undo and level navigation), the frozen puzzle library (js/levels.js: 11 levels, each BFS-verified offline to be solvable and non-trivial), the stylesheet, the analytics bridge and the touch shim are all Playnesta-original (MIT, see LICENSE.txt in the package). The closest upstream project in the puzzle domain, kuking/WaterSortPuzzleSolver @ 8aaf162 (MIT, Copyright kuking), is a command-line puzzle solver and not a playable build; it is recorded as the offline-verification reference only — no bytes are copied and no file under its MIT licence is redistributed. Playnesta Games is the developer and publisher of this web implementation.