Puzzle & Brain Games Nut Sorter

Nut Sorter is not a color puzzle in which every visually useful move is legal. You may take only the uppermost nut from a screw, and the destination must also satisfy the game's size relationship at the top. The finished board requires the used screws to contain uniform colors. Before making the first transfer, read every stack from top to bottom. Identify colors that are nearly complete, target nuts buried under several blockers, and top pieces that can legally enter a temporary position. An empty screw is the board's most valuable working resource. Filling it too early removes the space needed to separate mixed colors. A strong opening move often clears a top nut that exposes several useful pieces beneath it, rather than completing the most obvious color immediately. Plan the landing and the move after it together. Once the current nut is placed, ask whether it can be removed again and where the newly exposed nut from its old screw will go. A transfer that is legal now can still create a deadlock two moves later when every available top rejects the next piece. Size makes the order more restrictive than an ordinary liquid-sorting puzzle. A matching color is not enough when the receiving top cannot carry the nut, so search for a compatible larger top or preserve a fully open screw for that stage of the sequence. Completing a uniform stack is useful because it removes visual clutter, but it can also take a screw out of circulation. Before closing that color, confirm that the remaining mixed stacks still have enough legal landing positions. On a complicated board, choose one deeply buried color as the current project. Move its blockers in an order that keeps them recoverable, then bring the matching nuts together gradually. Trying to advance many half-finished colors at once consumes the spare positions and makes the purpose of each transfer harder to follow. When the board begins to feel crowded, stop dragging and inspect only the top of each screw. Look for a short sequence that frees a whole position rather than moving a nut to another equally crowded stack. A useful temporary move has a clear exit plan; a weak one merely hides the same problem beneath a new piece. If a color needs one final nut but the route is blocked, do not dismantle several completed groups at random. Trace the final nut upward, list the blockers above it, and clear those blockers from top to bottom into destinations that remain legal under the size rule. If no such chain exists, the mistake usually occurred earlier when a transfer screw was filled or a uniform stack was closed too soon. Restarting from that decision is cleaner than adding more temporary moves. The reliable method combines three checks every time: the color you ultimately want to group, the size that the destination can accept, and the amount of free transfer space left afterward. Keeping all three in view turns a crowded arrangement into a series of reversible steps and prevents the common situation in which every visible move has disappeared.