Flood It
PuzzleHow to Play
Goal: Turn the entire board into a single color before you run out of moves.
Controls: The flood starts in the top-left corner. Tap a color swatch below the board to flood your area into that color. Every same-colored tile touching your region joins it.
Rules: You get 25 moves on a 14 by 14 board. Plan ahead, grab the color that swallows the most tiles, and finish with moves to spare. Your fewest-moves best is saved on this device.
About Flood It
Flood It is a deceptively simple flood-fill puzzle: the board is a 14x14 grid of six colors, you control the territory growing from the top-left corner, and each color you pick converts your whole territory to that color, absorbing every adjacent cell that matches. The goal is a single-color board in as few moves as possible.
Behind the cheerful grid sits genuinely hard math: computer scientists have proven that finding the optimal Flood It solution is NP-hard, which puts a perfect game beyond any simple formula. Every move is a trade between the color that grabs the most cells now and the color that opens the biggest region later, and greedy play is measurably beatable.
Flood It in fewer moves
- Scan the whole board before your first move, the biggest connected regions in the middle decide the game, not the cells beside you.
- Do not always take the color that adds the most cells now. Pick the one that connects you to the largest future region.
- Expand toward the far corner along a broad front. A wide frontier absorbs more with each move than a narrow tentacle.
- Note colors that appear in isolated pockets. Sweep them up in one late move rather than several early ones.
- If two colors look equal, choose the one that touches more distinct regions. Connectivity beats raw cell count.
FAQ
What is the best strategy for Flood It?
Play for connectivity, not immediate gain. The greedy move that captures the most cells right now often walls you off from the board's largest regions. Aim each pick at linking your territory to the biggest clusters still ahead of you.
How many moves should a 14x14 board take?
Solid play on six colors usually lands in the low-to-mid 20s, and this game saves your best move count so you can chase it. Perfect play is a hard optimization problem, so there is always another move to shave.
Why do my last few moves feel wasted?
End-game moves often convert just a few stubborn pockets each. That is the sign those colors should have been folded in earlier, when one move could absorb several pockets at once. Late-game waste is caused in the mid-game.
Is Flood It a luck game?
The starting board is random, but every board is fully visible from move one, so there is no hidden information and no luck after the deal. Two players on the same board can differ by five or more moves purely on route choice.
