About this game
Glasswort is a colour sorting puzzle on an apothecary's bench. You pour colours between bottles until each colour is all together in one bottle. If you've played a water sort or ball sort puzzle, that bit will feel familiar straight away. Then the second kind of bottle turns up and none of your habits work any more.
Every other game like this uses one container: a tube you can only touch from the top. Glasswort has three, and they don't agree with each other.
- A phial is the tall tube you already know. You pour from the top.
- A retort is a round bottle with a spout at its foot. It fills at the top and empties from the bottom, so the first colour you put in is the first one back out.
- A basin is a shallow dish. It takes any colour at all and you can lift either one out. It's the only free space on the bench, and it's too shallow to ever finish a colour, so you have to hand it back empty.
That's the whole idea. The shape of the bottle changes what you can do with it. A colour stuck at the bottom of a phial is a problem. The same colour at the bottom of a retort is the next thing out.
There are 120 puzzles across five chapters, and each chapter teaches you one new bottle before asking you to juggle two. The game solved all 120 before you got them, so the target number of pours beside each level is real, and none of them can be impossible. Past level 120 the shelf keeps going with new puzzles made on the spot, and those honestly claim no target at all. There's also one puzzle a day that everybody gets.
How to play
- Tap a bottle to lift it, tap another to pour. All of the colour you picked up goes across, as much as fits. Tap the same bottle again to put it down.
- A phial pours from the top. You can only pour onto a matching colour, or into an empty bottle. That's the rule every game like this is built on.
- A retort pours from the bottom. It still fills at the top, so filling one is a decision about what order things come back out. That's the puzzle, not a trick.
- A basin takes anything. Two colours side by side, either one liftable. It's the most useful thing on the bench and the easiest way to get stuck, because it has to end up empty.
- Get every colour together. A colour is done when all of it is in one bottle. The bar at the top counts how many you've finished.
Controls
| Input | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tap / click | lift a vessel, then tap another to pour into it |
| U | undo the last pour |
| R | restart this bench |
| L | the shelf — all 120 preparations |
| T | today's daily bench |
| M | sound on/off |
| Fullscreen | hides the browser so the game has the whole screen. Press it again to bring the browser back |
Tips for fewer pours
- Look after your basins. They're the only place a spare colour can go, and a basin holding two colours you can't move is how most benches get stuck. Only put something in one when you can already see what takes it back out.
- Read a retort from the bottom up. Your eye will go to the top out of habit. What matters is the colour at the foot, because that's what's coming out next.
- Fill retorts on purpose. Pouring into one is queueing something up for later. Fill one without a plan and you've buried a colour behind everything you added after it.
- Finish one colour before you start another. Splitting a colour across three bottles costs you pours you never get back.
- Undo costs nothing. Press U to step back a pour, as often as you like. Only the label at the end counts.
- The target is real. It's the fewest pours the game itself could manage on the same bench. Matching it is a genuinely good result.
Good to know
- Nothing to buy and nothing to unlock. No sign-up, no chat, and no way for players to contact each other.
- No timer and no penalties. Undo as much as you like, restart whenever you want, and if a bench ever has no legal pour left the game tells you plainly instead of leaving you staring at it.
- Colour is never the only clue. Each colour carries its own small mark, so the bench still works if you can't tell two of them apart. Turn the marks on and off with the sigils button.
- It plays just as well with a finger as with a mouse. The whole game is single taps on big targets, and every key it lists is also a button on the screen.
- Progress saves in this browser. A dare link carries the bench itself, so it rebuilds for anyone who opens it.
New to this kind of puzzle? The water sort guide explains the rules, the strategy that works in every game like it, and why some levels in other games really are impossible. There are guides to ball sort puzzles and liquid sort games too. Stuck on a puzzle in another game? The free water sort solver will finish it for you.
