Color Flood

Overview

Cover the board within the move budget. Easy starts with 30 moves, Medium gives 25, and Hard gives 22. Color Flood starts with a fourteen-by-fourteen grid seeded with six colors and your ownership limited to the top-left square. Each turn you pick a color, and every square you currently own — plus every adjacent square of that same color — flips to match it, expanding your territory outward in a single ripple. The animation is instant, which lets you read the new frontier immediately and plan the next pick without waiting on a transition. The puzzle is in the order: jumping to a color that barely grows your footprint wastes a move, while jumping to the color that connects the largest adjacent cluster can double your territory in a single step. Three difficulty presets change the budget and the grid's behavior, and the best score for each difficulty persists, so once the default is solved the harder presets give the same rules a tighter leash. It is a conquest puzzle distilled to its cleanest form — no timer, no pressure, just the math of absorption and a move counter ticking down.

How to Play

Pick a color and your territory changes to match. Press 1–6 for the six palette colors, click a color with the mouse, or tap a color on a phone — whichever input you use, the effect is identical: every square you own, plus every same-colored neighbor touching it, switches to the chosen color and joins your blob. Pick again next turn. The board is a fourteen-by-fourteen grid with six colors in play, and the goal is to absorb every square within the move budget for your chosen difficulty. A move counter tracks your spend, and the best score per difficulty is saved so you can measure yourself against your tightest prior run.

Tips & Strategy

In an opening-turn check, pressing the key for the current color left the move counter at zero. Pick a different color that touches the territory to spend the first move.

Always pick the color that grows your footprint the most, not the color that looks biggest on screen. The trap is choosing a color that already dominates the visible grid when only a sliver of it touches your territory — that pick converts almost nothing, and the wasted move compounds because the budget is fixed. Trace the actual frontier: count, for each candidate color, how many unowned squares of that color border your owned region, and take the one with the highest count. In the opening moves, favor colors that connect you to large internal clusters, because once your territory wraps around a cluster it will fall in a single pick later. Late game, the optimal play often narrows to one or two viable colors per turn, and at that point the discipline is patience rather than ingenuity — work the math, take the largest absorption available, and resist the urge to shortcut through a color your territory barely touches. The harder presets reward counting over intuition; if a pick feels obvious, double-check the frontier first.