How to Play Soak

Soak is a color flood-fill puzzle played on a pastel grid. The game starts with your territory anchored at the top-left corner — one cell and any immediately connected neighbors sharing its starting color. Below the grid is a row of six colored buttons. Each turn you pick one of those colors: your territory instantly repaints to it, then expands outward via breadth-first search, absorbing every adjacent cell that already matches your new color. This chain reaction can sweep across multiple connected regions in a single move. Win the level by flooding every cell on the grid before your move counter hits zero.

The twenty levels are divided into three difficulty tiers. Levels one through five use an eight-by-eight grid with four active colors and twenty moves — generous enough to teach the mechanic. Levels six through ten step up to a ten-by-ten grid with five colors and twenty-five moves. Levels eleven through twenty switch to a twelve-by-twelve grid with all six colors and thirty moves. The added colors and larger grids make the later levels far more combinatorially complex, requiring you to plan several moves ahead rather than simply grabbing whatever color is largest nearby.

Strategy Tips

• Expand from the perimeter inward. Color clusters near the edges are harder to reach later in the game. Target border regions early so you don't find yourself cutting across the full grid to pick up two or three isolated cells at the far corner when you're low on moves.
• Count cluster sizes before picking. Before tapping a color, look at how many cells of that color are adjacent to your territory boundary. The color that touches the most of your frontier cells in a single BFS sweep is usually the greedy optimal move — especially in the early game when the territory edge is short.
• Save hints for the mid-game squeeze. The hint system is most valuable on levels ten through twenty, where five or six colors compete for similar-sized clusters and the optimal pick isn't obvious. In the first few moves on any level the largest cluster is usually self-evident; save your three hints for when the board is half-flooded and you're debating between two color runs of nearly equal size.
• Perfect bonuses are reachable on lower levels. Finishing level one with five or more moves to spare is easy — the eight-by-eight grid with four colors usually takes twelve to fifteen optimal moves, leaving five or more from the twenty allowed. The 500-point Perfect bonus stacks with the level score, making early-level perfects worthwhile for a high cumulative score run.

Grid Sizes and Move Budgets Explained

The three grid configurations in Soak are calibrated so that optimal play sits just within the move budget, but suboptimal play consistently runs out. On an eight-by-eight grid with four colors, the expected minimum flood solution is around twelve to fourteen moves. The twenty-move budget therefore gives experienced players a comfortable margin but punishes random clicking. On a twelve-by-twelve grid with six colors, optimal solutions typically require twenty to twenty-six moves — very close to the thirty-move limit — so even a few wasteful picks can end the level early.

The seeded RNG means each grid is deterministic. Level three will always have the same tile layout every time you play it, in every browser session. This lets you retry a hard level with prior knowledge of where large same-color clusters sit, making second attempts on tricky boards significantly easier. The level-select screen marks completed levels in green and Perfect completions in gold, so you can see at a glance which levels have room for improvement and revisit them to master tricky boards before your next full run.

Scoring and High Scores

Your score compounds across all twenty levels in a single run. Each level you win adds (movesLeft × 50) plus (level × 100) to your total. A level-fifteen win with eight moves remaining, for example, contributes (8 × 50) + (15 × 100) = 400 + 1500 = 1900 points. The Perfect bonus adds a flat 500 points on top whenever you clear a level with five or more moves to spare, independent of the level number. Across twenty levels a full Perfect run produces a substantially larger total than a minimal-clear run, giving veteran players a long-term goal even after they can reliably beat every level.

Your personal best is stored in your browser's localStorage under the key soak_hs and persists between sessions as long as you don't clear site data. The HUD always shows your current best so you can see mid-run whether you're on pace to break your record. The leaderboard below the grid lets you compete against other Vibe Arcade players, and your final run total is submitted when the run ends — either when you run out of moves or when you clear level twenty. Losing ends the run and the next game starts a fresh score.