Shade Sort
Pour the stacks until every tube holds a single shade.
How to play Shade Sort
Click a tube to lift the top run of matching pieces, then click another tube to pour them. You can only pour onto an empty tube or onto a matching shade, and tubes have a fixed capacity. Sort every tube so it holds a single shade to win, in as few pours as possible.
How to solve Shade Sort
Shade Sort is a puzzle about the order of operations. You can lift only the top run of matching pieces from a tube, and you can pour it only onto an empty tube or onto one whose top piece is the same shade, and only as far as the receiving tube has room. Because every pour is constrained this way, the whole puzzle turns on sequencing: freeing the shade you need before you accidentally bury it. The dependable approach is to look for pours that make undeniable progress (finishing a tube, or emptying one completely) while protecting your working space so you always have somewhere to pour next.
A tiny example worth internalising
Take the smallest interesting position: tube one holds a dark piece on top of a light one, tube two holds a light piece on top of a dark one, and tube three is empty, every tube two pieces tall. Pour tube one's dark piece into the empty tube. Tube one is now a lone light piece, so tube two's light piece pours onto it: first tube finished. Tube two's dark remainder joins tube three, and the board is solved in three moves. Notice what each pour did: the empty tube received a piece that had nowhere else to go, and every move either finished a shade or uncovered one. Big puzzles are this pattern looped. When a board feels impossible, find the small version hiding inside it, a pair of tubes whose tops can trade right now, and ask whether that trade uncovers anything or merely shuffles the problem sideways.
Pouring tips and how to avoid getting stuck
Most dead ends are self-inflicted, created a move or two earlier by pouring the wrong run into the wrong tube.
- Guard at least one empty tube as a workspace; filling your last free tube is the quickest way to lock the board.
- Prefer moves that consolidate a shade or complete a tube over ones that merely shuffle pieces sideways.
- Before pouring a run onto a different tube, check you are not trapping a shade you will need underneath it.
- Pour a long run onto a matching top only when there is room for the whole run; splitting it fragments that shade across tubes.
- When stuck, hunt for a single unblocking pour. Often one buried shade must come out before anything else can flow.
The puzzle is always solvable without luck, but it is easy to talk yourself into a corner, so plan two or three pours ahead. If a shade you need is stranded at the bottom of a tube under two others, work out how to clear both of those first before you commit any pour that would stack a third on top.
Read the board before the first pour
Two quick scans tell you how hard a layout will be. First, count fragments: the number of separate runs each shade is broken into across all the tubes. A shade split into four fragments needs at least three consolidating pours, so the fragment totals are a rough floor on the solution length and point at the tangled shade you should untangle first. Second, look at the bottom piece of every tube, because a tube can only finish in the shade sitting at its base unless you empty it completely. If three tubes share the same bottom shade, at least two of them must be emptied at some stage, and knowing that in advance stops you polishing a tube that is doomed to be dismantled anyway. The true chokepoints are bottom pieces of a scarce shade buried under long mixed stacks; plan your empty-tube budget around digging those out early, while you still have space to spend.
Where the sort puzzle comes from
Shade Sort is a minimalist take on the ball-sort and water-sort puzzle, a casual genre that swept the mobile app stores around 2019 and 2020. Its bones are far older. The Tower of Hanoi, invented by the French mathematician Edouard Lucas in 1883, runs on the same engine: you may touch only the top of a stack, so the entire game is the order of operations. Older still are the decanting riddles of Renaissance arithmetic books, in which wine had to be divided using unmarked jugs through a chain of legal pours. Computer scientists will recognise the flavour of sorting with stacks, and they have also confirmed what the hard levels suggest: researchers have shown the general sort puzzle is NP-hard, meaning nobody knows a shortcut that beats genuinely thinking ahead. That is the charm. Nothing is hidden and no luck is involved, so every locked board was locked, two pours earlier, by you.
Shade Sort leaderboard
Top scores. Log in to compete.
- Loading leaderboard…
Shade Sort: frequently asked questions
Is every shuffle solvable?
Yes. Boards are created by scrambling a solved arrangement, so a solution always exists.
How does the sorting work?
Group every matching shade into its own tube. The pieces come in distinct shades and you sort them exactly the way you would sort by colour.
What are the rules for pouring in Shade Sort?
You pick up the top run of same-shaded pieces from one tube and pour it into another. The destination must be either empty or have a matching shade on top, and it must have enough spare capacity to receive the pieces. Tubes have a fixed height, so overflow is not allowed.
Why should I always keep an empty tube free?
An empty tube is your manoeuvring room. It lets you temporarily park a shade so you can dig out the one beneath it. Pour your last empty tube full of a mixed stack and you often lose the only space you had to rearrange, which locks the puzzle.
How do I get a shade out from the bottom of a tube?
You cannot reach it directly. You must first move every piece sitting above it, one matching run at a time, onto empty tubes or matching tops. Plan that unloading in advance so the pieces you remove all have somewhere legal to go.
How do I judge which shade to untangle first?
Count how many separate runs each shade is split into across the board. The shade with the most fragments is your bottleneck, and the deepest-buried of those fragments decides which tubes need unloading. Start the digging there, while you still have empty space to work with.
Is Shade Sort solvable without guessing?
Yes. Each layout can be sorted purely by reasoning about which runs to move and when. But it is easy to reach an unwinnable position through careless pours, so the skill is looking a few moves ahead rather than pouring reactively.
What kind of puzzle is Shade Sort related to?
It is the tidy, monochrome cousin of the popular ball-sort and water-sort puzzles, and it shares its DNA with the Tower of Hanoi and with stack-based sorting problems, where you may only touch the top of each pile and must reorder everything through legal intermediate steps.
Is Shade Sort free to play?
Yes. Shade Sort is completely free on Inkplay, with no download, no sign-up, and no in-game purchases. Open the page and play instantly on desktop or mobile.
Can I play Shade Sort unblocked?
Yes. Shade Sort runs entirely in your browser with no download, install, or plugins, so it loads instantly and keeps working even on school or work networks where bigger game sites get blocked.
More games to play
In the mood for more? Try 2048, Memory Match, Lights Out, Minesweeper, or browse all puzzle games and the full games list on Inkplay.