LemonArcade
Nuts Puzzle: Sort By Color belongs to the sorting-puzzle family that took over mobile stores after Water Sort Puzzle, but it swaps liquid for hardware. Each level shows a row of vertical screws, and threaded onto those screws are stacks of coloured hex nuts. Your only move is to lift the top nut off one screw and drop it onto another. The level is solved when every screw holds nuts of a single colour, or sits empty. On major web portals the game is credited to independent developer Aleksei Skachko, was built in Unity, and reached the browser in January 2024 shortly after an Android release in December 2023. On LemonArcade it arrives through the Playgama catalogue, which is why the distributor's name appears as the publisher.
The rule that gives the game its teeth is the placement restriction. A nut can only land on an empty screw or on top of a nut of the same colour. That means a screw with a blue nut on top will refuse a red one, and the only way to expose the red nut buried three positions down is to peel off everything above it and park those nuts somewhere legal. Early levels give you a spare empty screw and three or four colours, so the solution is almost mechanical. From the mid-teens onward the free space shrinks, the palette widens, and some nuts are shown as grey until the nut above them moves, so you commit to a plan without knowing the full stack underneath.
There is no move counter ticking down and no timer, which changes how you play compared with the harsher entries in the genre. The pressure is spatial rather than temporal: you can stare at a board for as long as you like, but a careless sequence can wedge every screw with mismatched tops and leave you no legal move. The game answers this with a small toolkit. An undo button reverses your last placements a limited number of times per level, a reset wipes the board back to its starting layout, and chests or a reward wheel between levels can hand you an extra screw, which is the single most valuable item in the game because it is pure working space.
What makes it distinctive inside a crowded genre is the physicality of the presentation. Nuts spin as they thread down a screw, stacks have visible height, and the hidden-colour mechanic uses the fact that a nut sits inside a stack rather than in a transparent tube. The pacing is also unusually calm. Levels are short, typically under two minutes, but the difficulty ramp is steady enough that a session of twenty levels feels like a slow climb rather than a wall you hit at level 30. The sound design does a lot of quiet work too: a nut seating on a matching stack has a satisfying metallic click that makes a completed screw feel earned.
It suits players who like Water Sort, Ball Sort or Hex Sort and want a variant with a slightly different visual logic, and anyone who wants a thinking game that does not punish slow decisions. Younger players can handle the opening levels without help, while the later boards with hidden nuts and no spare screw reward the kind of lookahead that older puzzle fans enjoy. It is not a game for people who want a story, unlockable characters or competitive scoring; the reward is the click of the last nut settling into place and the next board sliding in.
On LemonArcade it runs free in the browser with nothing to install and no account to make. The game was designed for phones first, so it works cleanly on touch screens as well as with a mouse, and the portrait layout leaves empty space on a wide monitor. Levels take a minute or two each, which makes it easy to play in short bursts between other things, and the game resumes on the current board. Progress is stored by the game inside your browser, so clearing site data or switching devices starts you over. Difficulty is gentle for the first dozen levels and genuinely demanding once hidden nuts and full screws combine.