How to Play Water Sort Puzzle: A Beginner's Complete Guide

Water sort is one of those puzzles that looks trivial for the first twenty levels and then quietly becomes a planning game. The rules fit in a paragraph. Playing well takes a bit more.

The rules, in full

You are given a row of tubes. Each tube holds up to four segments of coloured liquid, stacked on top of each other. The colours start mixed. You win when every tube contains one colour and nothing else, or is empty.

You move liquid by tapping one tube and then another. That's the only move in the game. A pour is legal when:

• The source tube is not empty.
• The destination tube is empty, or its topmost segment is the same colour as the source's topmost segment.
• The destination has room.

One thing catches almost everyone out on their first session: a pour moves the entire matching run at once, not one segment. If the top of your source tube is three consecutive greens and the destination has room for three, all three travel together. If the destination only has room for two, only two move and one stays behind. That partial pour is the single most common source of an accidental dead board.

Your first ten moves

Open a level and resist the urge to touch anything. Look for tubes that are already nearly solved. A tube holding three of one colour needs exactly one more segment, and finding that segment is usually the cheapest progress on the board.

Then work in this order:

1. Complete anything one move from done. Free progress, no cost.
2. Consolidate matching tops. If two tubes both show blue on top, merging them frees depth without spending an empty tube.
3. Only then open something up. Uncovering a buried colour costs you flexibility, so do it last and do it deliberately.

Empty tubes are the currency

New players treat empty tubes as storage. They are not storage. They are the only thing that lets you undo a bad arrangement, and every colour you park in one costs you the ability to unpack something later.

The rule to internalise early: never pour into an empty tube unless the pour either completes a colour or unlocks a specific move you have already planned. "I'll move this out of the way for now" is how boards die.

A useful check before any pour into an empty tube: name the move it enables. If you can't, don't make it.

The two beginner traps

Splitting a solved colour. You have three reds stacked neatly, and pouring them out reveals something useful underneath. It rarely is. Once a colour is consolidated, leave it alone unless completing it is impossible otherwise.

Filling every tube to depth three. A board where six tubes each hold three segments and nothing matches is unwinnable in almost every layout, because you have no room to manoeuvre and no empty tube to reset into. Keep at least one tube free for as long as you can.

When you are stuck

Being stuck in water sort almost always means the mistake happened five moves ago, not now. Undo is not cheating. It is the intended way to explore. Use it freely, and if a level resists three honest attempts, restart rather than grinding; a fresh look at the starting board is usually faster than untangling a ruined one.

Start on an early level, play slowly, and watch how much of the board you can solve before you touch an empty tube.