Rules
- Tap a shelf to pick up its top token. Tokens of the same kind stacked together come up as a group.
- Tap the shelf to put them on. Tokens go only onto an empty shelf or onto the same kind. Whatever does not fit stays where it was.
- You clear the stage when every shelf is either empty or full of one kind.
Tap the picked-up shelf again to cancel. Choosing a shelf where the tokens cannot go moves nothing.
Reading the tokens
Each kind has its own color and its own shape, so you can tell them apart even in black and white.
Stars, par and best
Every stage has been searched exhaustively to find its par, the fewest moves possible. No boosters or extra shelves are ever needed.
- ★★★: clear in par moves without a hint (PERFECT)
- ★★: clear within par + 2 moves (on long stages, within 20% over par)
- ★: clear the stage
A play that uses a hint earns at most ★★. Each stage keeps your highest stars and your best move count. The stage list and the result screen show your star totals for each level and overall (stars earned / stars possible).
Undo takes the board back one move but keeps the move count. Retry returns to the starting board, resets the count to zero, and starts again without any hint used. Neither erases your stars or best.
A hint highlights one shelf worth moving next. It does not show where to put the tokens. If the current position can no longer be cleared, the hint says so.
Keyboard
- Tab
- Move to the shelves
- ← → / ↑ ↓
- Move to the next shelf
- Enter / Space
- Pick up or put down
- Esc
- Cancel the selection
Saving your records
Cleared stages, your best moves and highest stars for each stage, your level and the last stage you played are saved only in this browser's localStorage (picochest.play.pico-sort.v1). Boards in progress are not saved. Nothing is sent to a PicoChest server, and records do not carry over to another device or browser. Clearing browser site data removes them. See the Privacy Policy for details.