Ball sort puzzle: rules, tactics and free games
A ball sort puzzle gives you tubes full of mixed coloured balls and one job: end up with every tube holding a single colour. It looks easy for the first ten levels and then quietly turns into a planning problem.
Here’s how it works and how to get good at it.
How a ball sort puzzle works
- You can only pick up the top ball of a tube.
- You can only drop it on a ball of the same colour, or into an empty tube.
- Fill a tube with one colour and that colour is done.
That’s it. Every ball sort puzzle, colour sort game, nut sort and water sort runs on those three rules. The art changes and the puzzle doesn’t. The one real difference is how much moves at a time: ball sort usually moves one ball per tap, while water sort pours a whole matching run at once. So ball sort levels take more taps for the same amount of thinking.
Five things that clear hard levels
Your empty tubes are your budget. The number of free slots on the board is the real difficulty setting. Every level you lose, you lost because you spent your last empty tube on a move that didn’t open anything up.
Never split a colour you could join. Spreading one colour across three tubes is the most common mistake in the genre. Bringing it back together looks like a wasted turn and almost never is.
Play for what gets uncovered. A move is worth making for the ball it reveals, not the tidy stack it leaves behind. Ask “what’s underneath?” before every move.
Work from the buried balls up. A colour stuck at the bottom of a full tube decides the order of everything else, because all of it needs somewhere to go first. Find the worst-buried colour and plan around freeing it.
Undo early and often. There’s no punishment and no timer in almost every game like this. If a move felt wrong two moves ago, take it back. Only the finished board counts.
Can a ball sort level be impossible?
Yes, and it’s worth knowing. A lot of these games shuffle their levels at random and never check them, so genuinely impossible boards do go out. It isn’t laziness so much as cost: working out whether one of these puzzles can be solved is an NP-complete problem, proven for both ball and water sort, and checking every level takes real computing time.
If a level has beaten you for a while, our free water sort solver works for ball sort too — same rules underneath. It gives the shortest answer, or tells you straight out that there isn’t one.
Free colour-sorting games in the browser
Glasswort is our version, and it changes the one thing every other ball sort puzzle leaves alone: the container.
Instead of one kind of tube, the bench has three. A phial works how you’d expect — in at the top, out at the top. A retort has a spout at its foot, so it empties from the bottom: the first colour you put in is the first one back out. A basin is a shallow dish that takes any colour and lets you lift either one, but it can never hold enough to finish a colour, so it has to end empty.
That one change breaks every habit the genre teaches you, in a good way. A colour buried at the bottom is a disaster in a phial and a gift in a retort.
120 levels, and none of them can be impossible. Each one was solved before it shipped, and the target beside it is a real minimum, not an estimate. After that there’s an endless shelf and one puzzle a day that everybody gets.
Free, no download, no account, and it plays fine on a phone.
Questions people ask
Is ball sort the same as water sort? Almost exactly. Water sort pours a whole run of matching colour at once. Ball sort moves one ball at a time.
How many levels do these games have? The big mobile ones run to thousands, made by a computer rather than designed. Glasswort has 120, tuned by hand, with a real ending.
Do I need to download anything? Not for a browser version. Glasswort loads in a tab.