Ballsort (PuzzleMadness)

About Ballsort (PuzzleMadness)

A Ballsort board is a row of tubes filled with mixed coloured balls and a couple of empty tubes. You move one ball at a time, always the top ball of a tube. A ball can go into an empty tube or onto a ball of its own colour, and no tube can hold more than its limit. The puzzle is done when every tube is either empty or full of one colour.

Most PuzzleMadness boards use tubes of four balls; the Tough puzzles use five, which leaves less room to shuffle. Today's Medium board, for example, has twelve tubes of mixed balls and two empty ones.

PuzzleMadness is a free puzzle website run by Dewi, a software developer who started out making games for the PlayStation 2, Nintendo Wii and DS and now builds the site as a hobby. It carries dozens of puzzle types, from classic sudoku to newer logic grids, and each one gets its own dated puzzle every day at each difficulty. Ballsort comes in Easy, Medium, Hard and Tough versions plus a Mixed page, and the same day's Ballsort puzzle is shared by everyone who opens it.

The site checks your grid as you go and tells you when it is finished; it does not publish solutions. Each completed puzzle earns a score, and scores feed a monthly and an all-time Ballsort leaderboard, where only your best attempt at a puzzle counts. Older days stay in the archive, so a missed puzzle can still be played later and still counts toward the current month. Playing needs no account; a free registration gives you a username on the leaderboards and a cloud save. The pages carry adverts.

How to play Ballsort (PuzzleMadness)

1. Open today's Ballsort page on PuzzleMadness and choose a difficulty from the menu above the grid.
2. Click a tube to pick up its top ball, then click the tube you want to drop it into.
3. A ball may only go into an empty tube or on top of a ball of the same colour, and never into a full tube.
4. Keep sorting until each tube holds balls of a single colour.
5. The site tells you when the grid is complete and adds your score; registered players appear on the leaderboards.

Screenshots

Tips

• Use the empty tubes as parking spaces, but try not to fill both with different colours or you can lock yourself in.
• Look for a colour whose balls sit near the tops of several tubes; gathering it first frees space quickly.
• Undo and reset are on the panel beside the board if a line of moves goes nowhere.
• Missed a day? Earlier puzzles are in the archive, and finishing one still counts toward this month's leaderboard.

Questions