How to Play Ball Sort Puzzle
Ball sort is one of those puzzles you understand in ten seconds and keep playing for a year. Here are the exact rules, the controls, and a worked example — everything you need to go from your first tube to clearing 12-color levels.
The rules of ball sort
- The board: a set of tubes, each holding up to 4 balls, plus 2 empty tubes. Every color in play has exactly 4 balls.
- The goal: finish with every tube either empty or filled with 4 balls of a single color.
- A legal move: take the top ball of any tube and drop it into a tube that is either empty or showing the same color on top — and that has room.
- That's it. No timers, no gravity tricks. The whole game is in choosing which legal move.
Controls
In our ball sort game: tap (or click) a tube to lift its top ball, then tap the destination tube. Tap the same tube again to put the ball back. The buttons above the board give you unlimited Undo, a Restart of the same level, a Hint (the solver's next best move), and Symbols — a color-blind mode that numbers every ball.
A worked example
Say a 3-color level opens like this (reading each tube bottom → top):
- Tube 1: red, blue, red, blue
- Tube 2: green, red, green, blue
- Tube 3: blue, green, red, green
- Tubes 4 & 5: empty
A clean line looks like:
- Tube 1 → Tube 4 (blue starts an empty tube)
- Tube 2 → Tube 4 (blue joins blue)
- Tube 3 → Tube 5 (green starts the other empty)
- Tube 1 → Tube 5? No — tube 1 shows red. Tube 3 → tube with red showing… you get the idea: always ask "which color am I uncovering?"
The point of the example: the first two or three moves in any ball sort level are about starting color homes in the empty tubes — not about making the board look tidy. For the full playbook (which color to home first, when to undo, how to read buried balls), see ball sort tips & strategy.
"This level looks impossible"
Almost every "impossible" ball sort position is just a few moves past a wrong turn. Undo a few steps and re-route. If you're genuinely wedged — or you're playing a mobile app with no free undos — enter your tubes into our free ball sort puzzle solver and it will either hand you the exact winning moves or prove the position unsolvable (which, in an app, means restart the level).