Tower Sort · Strategy Guide
How to Solve Tower Sort Puzzles
Colour logic plus planning ahead equals clean sorts every time.
The puzzle
Each tube holds a stack of coloured segments. You can move the top segment from one tube to another only if the destination is empty or its top segment matches the colour you're moving. The goal: every tube either fully one colour or completely empty.
The mechanic is simple but the puzzle is deep — most positions have many legal moves and only a handful that lead to a solution. The genre exploded in mobile gaming under names like Ball Sort, Water Sort, and Hoop Sort, all using identical rules.
Empty tubes are precious
Empty tubes are your scratch space. Every empty tube is a free destination — you can dump any colour there. But once filled, that flexibility disappears.
Rule of thumb: never fill an empty tube unless the move makes immediate progress (consolidating two stacks of the same colour, or freeing a colour you need underneath). Wasting an empty on a one-segment move you could have made into an existing tube is one of the most common errors.
Strategies that actually work
These four habits separate solvers from guessers.
- Match same-colour tops first. If two tubes have the same colour on top, move them together. This costs nothing and shrinks your problem.
- Free buried colours by emptying their containers. If you have three reds at the bottom of a mostly-blue tube, moving all the blues onto an existing blue stack frees the reds underneath. Look for this pattern aggressively.
- Don't strand the bottom colour. Once a colour is at the bottom of a tube, the only way to extract it is to empty the entire tube. Resist building stacks on top of colours you might need to move.
- Plan two moves ahead. Every move enables or disables the next one. Before any move, ask: "what does this open up, and what does it close off?"
A worked scenario
You have three tubes: tube A is [red, red, blue], tube B is [blue, red, blue], tube C is empty.
Naive move: pour the top blue from A into the top of B (both blue). A becomes [red, red] and B becomes [blue, red, blue, blue]. Looks like progress — but now you can't reach the bottom blue of B without moving the entire stack.
Smarter move: pour the top blue from B into empty tube C. B becomes [blue, red] and C becomes [blue]. Now pour A's top blue onto C: A is [red, red], B is [blue, red], C is [blue, blue]. Now move B's top red onto A: B is [blue], A is [red, red, red]. Move B's blue onto C and A and C are both monochrome.
Total: four moves vs five with the naive plan, with no stranded colours.
Common mistakes
Most failed sorts trace back to one of these.
- Filling an empty tube with a one-off colour. Now that empty's gone and you've done nothing useful.
- Moving a long stack onto a short one of the same colour, then needing to undo it. The reverse direction would have been one move; you spent five.
- Ignoring the bottom of every tube. The bottom colour determines what each tube can become. Plan around it.
Practice in your browser
Tower Sort puzzles vary in difficulty by the number of colours and tubes. Start at the default difficulty, watch for the four patterns above, and your move count per puzzle will drop fast.