LemonArcade
Card Sort: Challenge, developed by Masamoto Games and launched in April 2026 according to its official Playgama listing, takes the sort-matching-items-into-groups puzzle genre popularized by games like Water Sort and Ball Sort Puzzle and rebuilds it around playing cards grouped by color instead of liquids or balls. It sits alongside Stackitaire in LemonArcade's card-sorting family, but where that game groups by suit into ordered stacks, this one groups purely by color and leans much harder on environmental hazards to create difficulty.
The core loop is straightforward to describe: group matching-colored cards together and clear the entire board. You move cards into open positions to build up color groups, and you always need at least one free space to keep making moves. Run out of space with nothing left to shift, and the board locks with no legal move available, ending the attempt regardless of how much progress you had made up to that point. That single rule, always protect a free slot, ends up mattering more than any single hazard once boards get crowded.
What separates it from a plain sorting puzzle is a set of four distinct hazards layered onto later levels. Fog hides a card's color until you reveal it, so you cannot plan around it in advance. Bombs punish a careless move by exploding. Chains physically lock a card in place until a separate trigger releases it. Locks require a key item before they will open at all. Later boards typically combine more than one of these at once, which is a wider variety of obstacle types than most other games in the same genre bother to include, and it means no two late-game boards ever demand quite the same approach.
The progression system around that puzzle core is closer to a mobile free-to-play meta-game than to a simple single-session browser puzzle. Two currencies drive it: gold earned by completing levels, and diamonds earned through daily tasks and a Wheel of Fortune spin, or bought outright with real money. Daily, monthly and all-time leaderboards rank players by a mix of win rate and total levels completed, and card colors and themes can be customized cosmetically using earned currency. None of that customization changes how a board plays, but it gives long-term players a reason to keep spending currency once every level so far has been cleared.
That live-service structure, leaderboards, daily rewards, a spin wheel and a cosmetic shop, is heavier than most browser card puzzles attempt, and it rewards players who come back day after day rather than those looking for a single short session. The developer states that donations do not speed up progress beyond what levels already allow, since in-level actions stay capped regardless of how much currency a player has stockpiled, which keeps the core puzzle honest even with a purchase option present.
It supports twelve languages in this build, a strong signal of a broad international release behind it, and it runs free to start in the browser on LemonArcade with no download or account required. Individual levels are short, but the leaderboard and daily-task systems are built for repeat visits over days and weeks rather than one sitting, and the developer notes sound is not required to progress, so it plays fine muted as well.