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 is either empty or filled to the brim with four segments of a single color. 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. A tube only counts as done when it is full — splitting one color across two half-filled tubes will not clear the level. Finish the board and you move on to the next of 50 seeded 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. Board size is drawn from each level's seed rather than climbing steadily with the level number, so it jumps around: puzzles range from 5 tubes and 3 colors up to 11 tubes and all 7 colors, and level 1 happens to be one of the bigger ones. 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 rebuilds the same board and zeroes both penalties — your move count goes back to 0 and all three undos come back — so if you've made three or four bad moves in a row it costs less score than unwinding them 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 keeps the generator but pins it down: each of the 50 levels is built from a fixed seed, so the same numbered level is the same board for everyone, every time, and Restart hands you the identical puzzle instead of a fresh scramble. 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.
