Color Flood — Fill the Grid with One Color
Start from the top-left and flood-fill to turn the whole grid one color in limited moves.
How to play
- Your territory starts at the top-left corner.
- Click a color in the palette to flood-fill your region with that color.
- Any cells of the chosen color adjacent to your region get absorbed.
- Goal: make the entire grid one color in 25 moves or fewer.
- Plan ahead — pick colors that absorb the largest neighboring regions.
The top-left region is your territory. Click a color to flood-fill it — any connected adjacent cell of your current color gets repainted. Capture the entire grid before you run out of moves!
How it works
Color Flood starts with a grid of randomly colored cells. Your starting region is the top-left cell and all adjacent cells that share its color. Each turn you pick a color from the palette: all cells in your current region that border cells of that color absorb them, expanding your region. The goal is to capture the entire grid — making it a single color — within a limited number of moves.
The move limit is tight enough to require strategic thinking. Expanding greedily toward the largest adjacent color cluster each turn is the most effective general strategy. Avoid picking a color that expands your region only slightly when another color would gain much more territory.
Pay attention to isolated blobs of hard-to-reach colors that may require wasting a move to capture. Prioritizing them earlier, before your region surrounds them, often saves moves overall. Think about the path to the bottom-right corner specifically, since it is the farthest point from the start.
Color Flood is a quick strategy puzzle that rewards pattern recognition and multi-step planning.
Worked example
Planning the first three moves
- Look at the top-left region and identify which adjacent color clusters are largest.
- Pick the color of the biggest adjacent cluster as your first move, absorbing it into your region.
- After expanding, identify the new largest adjacent cluster bordering your (now larger) region.
- Pick that color as your second move.
- Continue greedily selecting the largest bordering cluster while watching for isolated blobs to address before they become surrounded.
Significant board coverage achieved in the first three moves, leaving a manageable remainder.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Picking a color that adds only one or two cells when another color would absorb a large cluster.
- Ignoring isolated color blobs until late in the game, forcing extra moves to reach them.
- Accidentally selecting the color your region already is, wasting a move.
Key terms
- Region
- The continuously connected group of cells currently under your control, which expands with each move.
- Flood fill
- The mechanic of absorbing all adjacent same-colored cells into your region when you select their color.
- Move limit
- The maximum number of color selections allowed; exceeding it means the puzzle is lost.
Frequently asked questions
- How does flood fill work?
- Clicking a color repaints your entire connected region (the top-left blob and anything it has absorbed) to that new color, absorbing any neighboring cells of the same color.
- How many moves do I get?
- 25 moves to fill the entire 10x10 grid.