A water sort puzzle is a sorting game: coloured liquid is mixed across several jars, you pour the top colour from one jar into another, and you win when every jar holds one colour. Brimful keeps those rules and changes one thing — every jar is a different size — so you plan where each colour fits.
How a water sort puzzle works
The rules fit in three lines, which is why the genre is everywhere.
- You can only move the top colour. Tap a jar to pick it up, tap another to pour. Whatever sits on top is what moves; the colours underneath wait their turn.
- Liquid only goes onto its own colour, or into an empty jar. Red pours onto red. Red does not pour onto blue. An empty jar takes anything.
- A jar never overflows. If the target has room for two measures and you are pouring three, two go in and one stays behind.
You win when every jar is either empty or full of one colour. That is the whole game, and it is enough: the difficulty comes from the order, because one careless pour buries a colour under another one that has nowhere to go.
What changes when every jar is a different size
In a standard water sort game every tube holds the same amount — four measures, usually. Once you can see the colours, the puzzle is only about sequence. Brimful takes that away. Jars hold anywhere from two to six measures.
Two things follow from that:
- A small jar fills up fast. You can have the right colour on top and still not be able to pour, because the jar is already full. And when there is room for only part of your colour, only that part goes in; the rest stays behind and can block you. The game tells you when a jar is full: that jar is full — too small for more.
- Each colour has exactly enough liquid to fill one jar of its own size. A colour with five measures can only finish in a five-measure jar (or a spare jar of the same size). Count the colour, find the jar it fits, and you know where it has to end up before you make the first pour.
That second rule is the one that turns sorting into planning. It is the reason the store listing calls Brimful a sort-and-pack puzzle: half the work is deciding what fits where.
How a level plays: pour, undo, add a jar
A move is two taps. The game highlights the jars you can legally pour into once you have picked one up, so you are never guessing about the rules — only about the plan.
When a plan goes wrong, you have two ways back:
- Undo steps back one pour at a time, as far as you like. There is no limit.
- Restart puts the level back to its starting position.
If you pour yourself into a dead end, the game says so — no moves left — instead of letting you tap at a stuck board.
Can a water sort level be impossible?
No. Brimful’s boards are built backwards: each one starts as a solved board and is scrambled with legal pours, run in reverse. A solution therefore always exists from the starting position.
What can happen is that you make a level unsolvable mid-way — usually by burying a colour under one that has nowhere to go. That is a sequencing problem, not a broken level, and undoing back to the last place you had a choice is almost always faster than restarting.
Three colours to eight
Level 1 uses three colours, so the first few boards teach the pour itself. Each new level adds a colour until the board holds eight colours plus two spare jars. Past that point each level is a fresh scramble of the same eight colours.
Stars without a clock
There is no timer and no lives. Instead, stars count your pours: any finish earns one, and fewer pours earn more. Three stars are hard to get — on many levels even a near-perfect solve earns two — so treat the third star as a challenge, not the normal result. The stars reward a tidy plan, not a fast thumb, which is why the game stays relaxing even on the hard levels.
Tips for capacity puzzles
- Count before you pour. Each colour’s total tells you the only jar size it can finish in.
- Fill the small jars first. A two-measure jar is the easiest to complete and the easiest to block; finishing it early frees your thinking.
- Keep a spare jar empty as long as you can. An empty jar is the only place any colour can go, so it is your undo button inside the puzzle.
- Do not split a colour across two big jars. It feels like progress, but you will have to pour it back together.
Water sort, color sort, ball sort — which is this?
These names are used loosely. Water sort and color sort usually mean the same pour-the-liquid game, and Brimful is one of those. Ball sort moves one ball at a time between tubes, so a stack of the same colour does not move together — a different feel. If you came for a ball sort game, this is not it; if you came for a water sort puzzle that makes you think a little harder than the usual four-measure tubes, it is.
Free, ad-supported, offline after the first launch
Every level is free and there is nothing to buy. The installed game shows an ad after some level wins; that is how it stays free. Open it once with a connection and the game is cached, so it plays on a flight or a train with no signal. If you would rather not install anything, the same puzzle runs in a browser at tool.teamzlab.com/games/brimful/.
Brimful is built by Teamz Lab. Our other puzzle game is Arrow Jam 3D, an arrow-clearing logic puzzle on a cube, and the rest are on the games page.