How to play Sort Shift
Sort Shift is a colour sorting puzzle. Each level starts with several tubes of mixed coloured tokens plus one or two empty spare tubes. Tap a tube to pick it up, then tap a second tube to pour into it. Tapping the same tube again cancels the selection. On a keyboard, the number keys 1 to 8 select the tube with that number, U undoes, R restarts the level, N moves on to the next level, and Esc cancels a selection.
There is no timer. A level ends only when you sort it, and any position stays recoverable because undo is always available. If a board does become impossible, the game says so directly rather than letting you keep pouring on a puzzle that can no longer be finished.
What counts as a legal pour
A tube holds four tokens. Every colour in a level appears exactly four times, which is why a tube that is full of one colour is finished — that colour cannot appear anywhere else.
A pour is allowed when the destination has space and either the destination is empty or its top token is the same colour as the top token of the source. The move carries the whole contiguous run of that colour from the top of the source tube, so three matching tokens stacked together travel in a single move. If the destination cannot fit the whole run, the pour still happens and moves as many as fit — the rest stay behind.
One move is refused that looks legal at first glance: a tube that is already a single colour cannot be poured into an empty tube. That would only relocate the stack without changing anything, and it would still cost a move. The board tells you which of the three reasons blocked a pour instead of silently ignoring the tap.
A level is solved when every tube is either empty or full of one colour.
Levels, moves and score
There are six authored levels, not endless generated ones. They run from three colours with two spare tubes up to six colours with two spares, and two of them — Tight Spare and Narrow Bench — give you only one empty tube to work with, which is the real difficulty jump.
Each level has a par: the shortest possible solution plus three moves. Clearing a level scores 60 points, plus 6 points for every move you finish under par. Inside a level the score also reflects how many tokens currently rest on a matching bottom, so progress shows up before you finish. Undo rolls the move counter back together with the board, so undoing does not spend your par budget; undos are counted separately and shown at the end of the run. Restarting a level resets that board and its move count to zero but keeps the points from levels you already cleared.
Two strategies that come from the actual levels
Do not spend your last empty tube on a colour that has nowhere to go. On Tight Spare, the third level, there is exactly one empty tube and only four opening moves — and two of those four make the level permanently unsolvable. Pouring the amber off tube 1 or the cyan off tube 4 into the spare leaves you with no working space and no way forward except undo. The two openings that work both park a pink token in the spare, because pink is the colour that has a matching partner ready to join it. Before you use the spare, check that the colour you are parking there has a next step.
Empty a tube outright rather than half-tidying several. A fully empty tube is worth far more than a nearly sorted one, because only an empty tube accepts a colour that matches nothing else on the board. On Narrow Bench, the fifth level, 29 of the 91 reachable positions are already unsolvable, and they are overwhelmingly positions where every tube holds two or three colours and nothing is empty. Given a choice, prefer the pour that clears a tube completely over the pour that merely stacks one more matching token.
Device support
Sort Shift works in a desktop browser and on phones and tablets in either orientation. The tubes are buttons, so keyboard and screen reader navigation work alongside tapping. The game is self-contained with no download, account, or third-party runtime, and your best score is stored locally in the browser on the device where you play.
