Wool Jars
Pour the wool until every jar holds one colour and nothing else.
How to Play Wool Jars
- Tap a jar to lift the wool off the top of it. Tap a second jar to pour that wool in.
- Wool only goes onto wool of the same colour, or into a jar with room and nothing in it.
- All the matching wool on top of a jar moves at once, as far as there is room for it.
- Get every jar down to a single colour and the board is solved; the next one is one colour harder.
Controls
| Keyboard | None. Click a jar to lift, click another to pour. |
|---|---|
| Touch | Tap a jar to lift the top wool, tap another to pour it in. |
Tips
- The empty jars are the puzzle. Before pouring anything, look at what you would have to move to get one of them empty again.
- Pouring onto a colour just to get it out of the way is usually how a board gets stuck — undo is free and unlimited, so it costs nothing to check.
- Look for a colour that is already three deep somewhere. That jar wants one more and finishing it frees whatever was sitting on top of the fourth.
About Wool Jars
A sorting puzzle in felt. Pour wool from jar to jar until each one holds a single colour. No timer, no score, and every board is built so it can be solved. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how Wool Jars was built
Boards are generated backwards. Starting from a solved arrangement and making random pours guarantees that a solution exists, because the shuffle itself is a solution played in reverse. The obvious alternative — fill the jars with a random permutation and hope — produces unsolvable boards at a rate that is low enough to feel like bad luck and high enough to ruin the game, and there is no way for a player to tell one from the other.
The jars get shuffled into random positions after generation. Without that step the empty jars are always the last two in the array and therefore always in the same corner of the screen, which makes every board open with the same move and look like the same board.
Taps land on the nearest jar rather than inside a rectangle. Rectangle hit-testing leaves the gaps between jars dead, and a tap that produces no response at all is the only genuinely frustrating thing that can happen in a game with no timer and no failure. Tapping a jar you cannot pour into picks that jar up instead of doing nothing, on the same reasoning.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a board be impossible?
No. Each board is built by starting from a solved arrangement and pouring wool around at random, so a path back to solved always exists. Boards generated by filling jars randomly can be unsolvable, which is why this one does not do that.
What if I get stuck?
Undo goes back as many moves as you like, all the way to the start of the board. Getting stuck is part of a sorting puzzle; being unable to back out of it is not.
Why does the wool sometimes move in twos and threes?
Because matching wool on top of a jar travels together. If three of the same colour are stacked and the target has room for two, two go and one stays.
Does it get harder?
Every second board adds a colour, up to nine, while the number of spare jars stays at two. More colours with the same working space is what makes later boards demanding.
Browse every game on Neon Arcade · read the dev notes behind them