Games Like Ball Sort Puzzle: the Best Colour-Sort and Car-Sort Puzzles

If you like Ball Sort Puzzle and want the next one, install Water Sort Puzzle from IEC Global: the same tubes and the same rule, with coloured water poured instead of balls lifted. Magic Sort! (Grand Games) is that water game with boosters, potions and a lot of shop around it. Hexa Sort (Lion Studios Plus) keeps the colours and throws away the tubes for stacks of hexagon tiles, and Car Sort: Color Puzzle (Rollic Games) sends coloured cars round a track into garages. With nothing to install, our free browser game Magic Sort is the ball-sort rule played with cars in parking bays, and Car Sort, also ours, adds a ring road that the cars drive round on their own. One catch each, below.

How we chose

• Sorting, not matching. You move colours between containers until each container holds one colour. Tap-three-into-a-tray games look similar on a store page and play differently, so they are in our Triple Match 3D list instead.
• A developer you can check. Ball sort is the most copied name in this whole corner of the store. Every pick names the developer printed on its own listing, on both stores where it has both.
• Free to start. All four competitor picks are free to download with in-app purchases. The price ranges are the ones on their US App Store listings.
• One thing changed. Each pick swaps one part of Ball Sort Puzzle: the balls, the container, the shop around it, or who decides where a piece lands.
• One real limitation each. Ours included.

Ball Sort Puzzle is an HM Games tube game with no clock

Dozens of apps carry the name, so we picked the one with the clearest identity and checked it on both stores: Ball Sort Puzzle®, the one with the registered mark, published by HM Games LLC FZ on the App Store and HM Games L.L.C-FZ on Google Play. Its rules fit in two lines. Tap a tube to move the ball on top of it into another tube, and a ball can only land on a ball of the same colour in a tube with room. Sort every colour into its own tube and the level is done.

The listing promises no penalties and no time limits, and lets you restart a level whenever you get stuck. It is free, with in-app purchases from $0.99 to $9.99 on the US App Store (removing ads is $2.99), and it runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro, on Android, and on Windows through Google Play. The App Store rates it 13+ and lists loot boxes and advertising; Google Play rates it Everyone. Its listing gives no level count and says nothing about offline play, so neither do we.

What keeps people in it is one piece of arithmetic: an empty tube is worth more than any ball in the game. Everything else in this list is a different answer to the question of what you do with that empty space.

The picks

Water Sort Puzzle, the same rule poured instead of lifted

IEC Global. Free on the App Store and Google Play, in-app purchases $1.99–$99.99, rated 13+. Swap the balls for layers of coloured water and the tubes for glasses, and you have it: tap a glass to pour into another, and the pour only happens if the colours match and there is space. The listing promises hundreds of levels with rising difficulty, free restarts, and says it is “fully playable” offline, which makes it the safest pick here for a flight.

The limitation: it is so close to Ball Sort Puzzle that if you stopped playing that game out of boredom rather than running out of levels, this will not cure it. And the top of its purchase range is $99.99, which is a lot of diamonds for a game about glasses of water.

Magic Sort!, water sort with a cauldron attached

Grand Games. Free on both stores, in-app purchases $0.99–$99.99, rated 13+. The puzzle underneath is water sort again: pick up a bottle, pour onto a matching top colour with room, one colour per bottle. What Grand Games adds is everything around it. You get Undo and a Shuffle that rearranges the bottles, boosts brewed in a cauldron, ingredients to collect, and enough events that the App Store’s age rating notes frequent contests and messaging and chat.

The limitation (partly opinion): the shop is large. Bundles run up to $99.99, the listing declares loot boxes, and the more you lean on boosts the less Ball Sort Puzzle’s quiet arithmetic is left. Its listing does not mention offline play. It also has nothing to do with our browser game of nearly the same name, which is our fault for picking a popular word.

Hexa Sort, colours without the tubes

Lion Studios Plus. Free on both stores, in-app purchases $1.99–$14.99. Hexa Sort keeps the instinct and changes the container: instead of tubes there are stacks of hexagon tiles, and you stack, sort and merge colours to hit each level’s collection goal. Power-ups and boosters sit on top. On Apple hardware it also runs on M1-or-later Macs and on Vision Pro. If what you liked about Ball Sort Puzzle was the colours settling down rather than the tube logic, this is the most different game on the list that still scratches it.

The limitation: the App Store rates it 18+, the highest rating here by a distance, and lists loot boxes and advertising. That rating is about the store’s content rules rather than anything grisly on the board, but it does rule it out as a handover to a child on an Apple account.

Car Sort: Color Puzzle, Rollic’s cars on a track

Rollic Games. Free on both stores, in-app purchases $1.99–$29.99, rated 13+. This is the store’s car-shaped answer to ball sort: its listing says you “tap to send colorful cars around the track”, match colours and park them in the right garages, across hundreds of quick levels. If Ball Sort Puzzle made you wonder what it would look like with traffic, this is the big-publisher version of that thought.

The limitation: its listing is three short paragraphs, so we cannot tell you much more about how it plays than that, and we are not going to guess. Its purchase list includes a $9.99 Monthly VIP Pass, the only subscription in this post, and it does not mention offline play. It is not our Car Sort, despite the name and the track. Read on.

Magic Sort, the ball-sort rule with cars, free in your browser

Ours, and free: Magic Sort runs in any browser with no download and no sign-up. The tubes are parking bays that hold four cars, and every colour has exactly four. Tap a bay and its front car lifts, along with any cars of the same colour directly behind it; tap another bay and they park there, but only if that bay is empty or its front car is the same colour. Four of a colour locks a bay shut, and the level is won when every colour is locked. That is Ball Sort Puzzle’s rule with one change in your favour: a run of matching cars moves as one piece, where Ball Sort moves a single ball per tap.

There are 240 graded levels, from three colours to ten, and after that it keeps dealing fresh boards at full difficulty. Within the first dozen levels some cars arrive under covers showing a question mark until they reach the front of their bay. Undo is unlimited, you get three hints and two extra bays per level, there is no timer, and every board is played through by a solver before you see it, so none is a dead deal.

The limitation: it is a browser game with no meta around it. No events, no boosters to brew, no 3D, and progress lives in your browser, so clearing site data resets it. Water Sort Puzzle beats it on offline play, and every app here beats it on spectacle. What it does well is the pure tube puzzle in ten seconds, for free.

Car Sort, where you choose which cars leave and they choose where to park

Also ours and also free in the browser. Car Sort puts every bay on one closed road and takes away half of each move. You tap a bay, its front run of same-colour cars drives out, and from there they park themselves: forward round the loop to the first bay with room whose front car matches, or, only if there is no match anywhere, the first empty bay ahead. If there is neither, they keep circling. The road holds a fixed number of cars, and if it fills with cars that have nowhere to go, the level is over.

That makes it the strategic opposite of Ball Sort Puzzle. You are not placing pieces, you are predicting where they will place themselves. It runs to 240 graded levels across five road shapes and up to twelve colours, then carries on endlessly, with covered cars early, unlimited undo, three hints and two extra bays a level, and a solver behind every board.

The limitation: it is the least forgiving game here. From level three you get one spare bay, the road punishes a careless tap with gridlock, and anyone who wants Ball Sort’s calm will find this one argues back. Undo is there for a reason. Start with Magic Sort if you want the rule you already know.

Match Heist is a match game, not a sort game

Since we have just recommended two car games of ours, we should be plain about the third. Match Heist, free on iOS and Android, is not a sort puzzle. You tap a car that has a clear road, it parks in a seven-slot lot, and three of a colour clear. There are no tubes and no bays to fill, and nothing ever moves back. It belongs with Triple Match 3D, not Ball Sort Puzzle.

It is here for one reader: the person who likes coloured cars more than coloured balls and wants a phone game with levels, a story and a corgi in it. Sir Wagsworth supervises the heists by drone and considers this a management role. If you want sorting specifically, the two browser games above are the right ones.

Side by side

The names are the hard part, and we are not helping

Search either store for “Ball Sort Puzzle” and you get a shelf of apps with that name or one word off it, from Guru, Spica, Topsmart, Longwind and many more, most with the same rack of coloured balls on the icon. HM Games alone has two: the original from HM Games LLC FZ, and a Ball Sort Puzzle Deluxe from a separately named HM Games Pty Ltd. We left the Deluxe off for exactly that reason. Car sort is no better: Car Sort Puzzle 3D, Car Parking Sort and Car Sort Puzzle – Color Game are three different small publishers, and we could not tell you which one you would get.

Then there is us. Our browser games are called Magic Sort and Car Sort, and the app stores have a Magic Sort! from Grand Games and a Car Sort: Color Puzzle from Rollic. They are unrelated games from unrelated studios, and we name our games the way everyone in this genre does: after what you do in them. The defence is the same as ever. Read the developer line, not the icon. Ours say Brightpoint Studios and live on matchheist.com.

Picking one

• You want more Ball Sort Puzzle, essentially: Water Sort Puzzle from IEC Global, which also says it plays offline.
• You want the same puzzle with boosts, events and something to collect: Magic Sort! from Grand Games, once you have looked at the shop.
• You want the colours without the tubes: Hexa Sort from Lion Studios Plus, if the 18+ rating is not a problem.
• You want it with cars, on your phone: Car Sort: Color Puzzle from Rollic Games.
• You want the tube rule right now, free, with no install: Magic Sort in your browser.
• You know the tube rule by heart and want it to fight back: Car Sort, where the cars park themselves.
• You like the cars more than the sorting: Match Heist, which is a match game and says so.

Every game on this list is a negotiation with the empty space, and the only real choice is how much help you want in it: boosts and shuffles, a free undo, or none at all and a road that answers back. If you want to find out which sort of player you are, Magic Sort is free in your browser, and our post on why sorting games feel so satisfying explains why you will keep going.