How to Play Sortwave
Sortwave is a free online water-sort color puzzle. Each tube holds up to four segments of colored liquid, and the goal is to sort the board so every tube contains only one color (or is empty). Tap a source tube to lift its top color — it visually highlights with a glow — then tap a destination tube to pour. A pour only succeeds if the destination is empty or its top color matches the lifted color, and consecutive matching segments pour together in a single flow. Complete a level by leaving every tube either empty or single-color, then move on to the next of 50 hand-crafted puzzles.
Your score per level is 1000 + (level × 50) minus 2 per move and minus 10 per undo used, with a 50-point floor. You get 3 undos per level — they reverse the most recent pour and don't refill — and a restart button that resets the puzzle without spending an undo. Levels scale up as you advance: 4–5 tubes and 3 colors early, climbing to 10 tubes and 7 colors by level 50. Daily challenge mode serves a single seeded puzzle to every player each calendar day with a one-shot leaderboard submission.
Strategy Tips
- Empty the most-mixed tube first. The tube with the most distinct colors is the hardest to resolve later. Clear its top segments early into matching tubes so you free up an empty slot to use as a buffer.
- Treat empty tubes as scratch space, not parking. Pouring into an empty tube only helps if you can pour out of it again soon — otherwise you've locked a color away from its matching home. Plan two moves ahead before committing to fill an empty.
- Pour onto matching tops to chain segments. If the source has three reds stacked and the destination has one red on top, all three pour together in one move. Setting up these multi-segment pours is the fastest way to keep your move count low and your score high.
- Save undos for the final tubes. Each undo costs 10 score points, but a wrong pour late in the level can cost an entire restart's worth of moves. Spend them defensively on the last few rearrangements, not on early experimentation.
- Restart instead of undoing a doomed level. Restart resets the puzzle without consuming an undo and without finalizing your move count yet — if you've made three or four bad moves in a row, it's almost always cheaper than burning undos one by one.
- Use Daily Challenge to benchmark form. Every player gets the same seeded puzzle for the day, so leaderboard placement is pure efficiency on identical input. Treat your daily attempt as a focused sprint — you only get one submission.
What Makes Sortwave Different
Water-sort puzzles exploded on mobile, but the app-store versions share a familiar formula: an ad after every level, undo buttons that charge premium currency, and endless machine-generated boards that blur together. Sortwave strips all of that out. The 50 levels are hand-crafted with a deliberate difficulty curve — early boards teach the buffer-tube idea, mid-game boards force multi-segment chain pours, and the last stretch demands genuine lookahead across ten tubes and seven colors. Nothing interrupts you between levels, and undos are a scoring decision rather than a purchase.
The scoring system is the other difference: because every move costs points, a completed level is not the goal — an efficient level is. Two players can both clear level 30, but the one who set up chained pours and skipped the undo button walks away with a meaningfully better score. Combined with the seeded daily puzzle, where everyone solves the identical board once per day, Sortwave turns a famously idle genre into something closer to a speed-chess ladder: calm on the surface, competitive underneath.
