Water sort dead ends: how to read a hard board
Every water sort player meets the board that looks fine and then quietly stops working. This guide explains what a dead end really is, how Decant detects one, how to read a hard board before you commit, and how to treat Par as a compass instead of a score.
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Brand new to the genre? Start with the beginner’s guide.
Two ways a board stops working
They look similar and they are not the same thing.
No pours left
Nothing on the board can legally pour at all. Decant tells you straight away: “No pours left”. Undo or restart.
A dead end
Pours still exist, so you can keep moving, but no sequence of pours can ever sort the board. You can slosh a color back and forth for as long as you like.
Decant checks for the second kind too. After a pour it runs the same kind of solver that proves every board solvable, and if that search finishes and finds no way through, it says “No way out from here”. The check is deliberately cautious. If a position is too big to settle quickly, Decant stays silent rather than risk telling you a live board is dead. So silence is not a guarantee. A board can be a dead end before the game is able to prove it, which is why reading the board yourself matters.
What actually causes a dead end
Every Decant board is solvable from the deal, so a dead end always comes from the order of your pours. It usually has one of four causes.
- 01A buried color.Units of one color sit at the bottom of full tubes under other colors, and there is no empty tube to move the covers into. Pouring onto a color seals whatever lies beneath it, so check what you are covering before you pour.
- 02Spares spent on mixed pours.Moving a top color into an empty tube is fine if it uncovers something that can then land on a match. If it does not, it only converts an empty into a half-filled, mixed tube. Do that twice and the board has no breathing room left.
- 03A scattered color.Each color has four units. If its four are spread across four different tubes, each beneath something else, you need a lot of room to bring them together. Splitting runs spreads colors like this.
- 04Full tubes that cannot take anything.A full tube accepts no pours. If every tube that could receive your top color is full of something else, that color has nowhere to go until you free a tube.
How to read a hard board before you pour
On tricky and severe boards (eight or ten colors) spend a short while looking before your first pour. This routine takes under a minute.
- 1Count your empties and your almost-empties.Two empty tubes at the start. Note any tube holding one or two units: those are cheap to clear and make new space.
- 2List the tops.Name the top color of every tube. Colors that appear on top of several tubes can be gathered quickly. A color that is on no top at all is buried and needs a plan.
- 3Find the shallowest color.Which color has its units closest to the tops? That is usually the best one to finish first, because completing it frees a tube for good.
- 4Trace what each candidate pour uncovers.For the two or three pours you are considering, read the color underneath the one you would move. Keep the pour whose uncovered color lands on a match.
- 5Protect your last empty tube.Treat the final spare as a reserve. Fill it only when the pour finishes a tube, empties another, or uncovers a color that can immediately move on.
Two spare tubes is a fixed rule in Decant, on every board and both tiers. Difficulty comes from the number of colors: 5 on gentle boards, 6 on steady, 8 on tricky and 10 on severe. Each added color is more to track with the same amount of room.
Par as a compass
Perfect is the fewest pours that can sort a board: Decant proves each board solvable before it ships, and the proved route sets it. Par is the goal a few pours above it, Perfect plus 15% and never fewer than two extra. A Close to par finish is Perfect plus 35%, at least four extra. Par and Close to par arrive in the Decant app with version 1.0.4; the browser version shows them now.
You do not need to chase Par on your first attempt. It is more useful as a signal. If you solve a board in far more pours than Par, you were probably shuffling or splitting runs, and the extra pours show you where. On the ladder, each solved board shows your best: a check mark for a Perfect clear, “Par” when you finished within Par, or “+3” if you used three extra pours.
The habit that gets players to Par is counting bands. A band is a separate run of one colour, and a colour in three pieces costs at least two pours to join. Before you pour into an empty tube, ask whether a pour onto a matching colour would join two bands instead.
A good second pass is to replay a solved board and ask which of your pours changed nothing. Remove those and you are usually close. A few older Daily boards show a single Target instead of Perfect and Par: it is the route that Daily was published with, and it is not guaranteed to be the minimum.
When it goes wrong: undo, or restart
When you realize a board is dead, go back to the last decision, not the last pour. Undo to the point where you chose between two real options, and try the other one. Free players get three undos per board, so save them for decisions rather than slips. Pro has unlimited undo on the ladder; on the ranked Daily, undo is three for everyone.
If you are many pours past the mistake, restart. Restart is free on every unranked board, in both tiers, and the deal is identical when you start again. Nothing in Decant is sold to rescue a stuck board: there are no extra tubes, no hints for purchase and no lives, because a purchase that removes the difficulty removes the puzzle.