Sorting Puzzle Games
Everything is mixed up and it has to end up separated. Balls poured between tubes, bolts unscrewed and re-seated, hexes stacked by colour, shelves put back in order.
All of it runs in the tab you already have open.
Sorting is the newest family in this catalogue and the one that has spread fastest, because the core loop is almost frictionless: one tap moves one thing, the rule is obvious, and progress is visible at every step. That makes it the easiest genre here to start and the hardest to stop.
Under the tidiness there is a real constraint problem. Every board gives you fewer free spaces than you need, so the question is never where something belongs but what has to move first to make room. The boards that beat people are the ones where the obvious move fills the only empty tube, and everything after it is stuck.
The subjects vary more than the mechanic does. Tubes of coloured liquid, birds on wires, bolts through boards, shop shelves, spools of thread — all the same underlying question dressed differently. Which dressing you prefer matters less than it seems; what changes the difficulty is the number of free slots the board starts with.
None of these are timed. A sorting board is a thing to work at while thinking about something else, which is most of why the genre exists.
Questions about this section
What makes a sorting board difficult?
The number of free slots, not the number of colours. A board with one spare space forces an exact order; one with three lets you experiment.
Can a sorting board become unsolvable?
Many can. Filling your last free space with the wrong colour usually locks the board, which is why most of them offer a restart.