🗂️ Stack Sort
🧩 Logic · 1 playsStack Sort
Shift runs of colour between stacks until every stack is a single hue.
About Stack Sort
Columns hold jumbled stacks of coloured pieces, and a move lifts the run of matching colour from the top of one stack onto another — legal only when the receiving stack is empty or shows the same colour on top. The aim is to finish with every colour gathered into its own complete stack. As with all sorting puzzles the danger is the careless early move: an empty column is the most valuable thing on the board, and filling one with a colour that has nowhere to go converts a winnable position into a locked one. New pieces keep arriving as stacks complete, so the sorting never quite ends.
How to Play
Tap a stack to lift its top run of matching colour, then tap the stack to receive it. A run may land only on an empty column or on the same colour. Complete a full stack of one colour to clear it — and guard your empty columns jealously.
💡 Tips & Strategy
Count before you pour. The stacks hold a fixed population of each colour, and the winning line always runs through knowing which colour can be completed soonest. Moving pieces for tidiness wastes the move limit that matters — the patience of the empty columns.
Treat empty columns as tools, never as storage. An empty column can receive any run, which makes it the only way to split a stack whose surface hides the colour you need. Fill it with a long run you can immediately build on, or use it as a brief way-station — but a colour parked there with no destination converts your best asset into your worst blockage.
Move runs, not singles, and grow runs deliberately. Since a lift takes the whole top run of one colour, consolidating scattered pairs into one long run before moving it saves moves later. The strongest single habit: before any move, ask what the move uncovers. Uncovering the fourth piece of a colour you can finish beats any move that merely relocates.
Because completed stacks clear and new pieces arrive, the game is a steady state, not a sprint — so keep one column's worth of slack at all times. The losing pattern is always the same: every stack topped with a different colour and nowhere to put anything. When you feel the board tightening, stop building the pretty run and spend two moves recreating an empty column; liquidity, as in most things, is worth paying for before you need it.