Read the board before you pour

Water sort's biggest trap is how forgiving the early levels feel — pour anything anywhere and they still fall over. Add colors and the same habit turns an opening into unsolvable soup within a few moves. Start every level with a thirty-second read instead: where are the four segments of each color buried, which tubes share the same bottom color, and how many empties do you have? After a proper read, the first few moves usually announce themselves.

Everything serves the dig

A tube only becomes new workspace when it is emptied to the bottom, so the midgame goal is always digging: prefer pours that expose matching bottom colors. When two tubes share a bottom color, clearing the upper layers of one lets the other's matching segment slide across — and suddenly you own an almost-complete tube. Rearranging pretty top layers, by contrast, mostly shuffles the problem sideways.

Empties are buffers, not bins

An empty tube's power is that it accepts any color — a freedom that disappears the moment you use it. Keep at least one empty (or near-empty) tube as a buffer while the board is still messy, and interrogate every pour into an empty: where is this segment going next? If the answer is "no idea", it will squat there for the rest of the game.

No sandwiches

The most common self-inflicted wound: pouring color A onto color B, then needing B two moves later — A is now a sandwich layer that must be relocated all over again. Before each pour, check the destination tube: will I need the color I am covering soon? The ideal landing spot is always a matching segment or an empty; pouring onto a different color is the move of last resort.

Stuck means wrong order, so re-read

A jammed position rarely means an unsolvable one — it means the pour order was wrong. Go back to reading: find the color closest to completion (three segments already together), list which tubes must move to free its last segment, then find the cheapest tube to empty. Solving water sort is a state-space search, and the human trick is to chase one or two concrete goals at a time instead of staring at every color at once.

On this site

Every level here is generated with a guaranteed path to completion — being stuck is always an ordering problem, never a broken level. The color count is adjustable: four colors to learn the feel, six for real planning. Rounds are short, which makes the habits above easy to drill one at a time.

Walk it through: start a six-color game of Water Sort and give it the thirty-second read first.