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Lizely

Water Flow Puzzle

Dig five-cell channels, release a deterministic six-particle flow, and fill five fixed containers for exactly 1,000 points.

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How to use

  1. 1.Toggle up to five visible soil cells to create an open channel from the top source toward the bottom container; rocks, source, and container cannot be changed.
  2. 2.Press Release Water to synchronously follow down, then down-left, then down-right through open cells; the tank accepts only a vertical final drop.
  3. 3.Inspect blocked or leaked paths, revise after the first failed layout, and capture 6/6 particles on all five levels for exactly 1,000 points.

About Water Flow Puzzle

Water Flow Puzzle is a five-level routing game built around small, fixed 7 by 7 boards. A source sits on the top row and a container waits on the bottom row. Between them, eight soil cells can be opened as channels while every other interior cell acts as rock. You may open at most five channels. When the layout is ready, Release Water runs the complete flow immediately. Capturing all six displayed particles clears the level for exactly 200 points, and clearing all five levels produces 1,000.

The movement rule is deliberately compact and visible. From its current cell, water first looks straight down. If that cell is not an open channel, it checks down-left, then down-right. The first available channel in that fixed priority order becomes the next cell. If none of those three cells is open before the last channel row, the flow is blocked. On the final channel row, the container captures water only through the opening directly above it. A final cell in another column sends the water through the bottom as a leak.

This is a synchronous cellular path simulation, not a decorative success check. Release calculates every move from the source through the submitted channel set. The path shown after release is the path the rules actually evaluated. Each flowed channel renders six particle dots, and the container reports 6/6 only when the path reaches its vertical opening. A blocked path and a leaking path both capture zero, but they receive different messages so the player can distinguish an incomplete route from a wrong bottom exit.

Every board is deterministic. There is no random source, hidden timer, animation race, changing obstacle, or frame-rate-dependent result. The same five-cell layout always follows the same ordered path after Restart. The game evaluates the route synchronously when Release is pressed, which makes touch, mouse, keyboard, fast devices, slow devices, and background tabs agree. The visible result does not depend on waiting for an animation to finish or estimating where a moving sprite stopped.

Each level has eight visibly diggable soil cells and a budget of five. Clicking or activating a soil cell toggles it between closed soil and open channel. Opening a sixth cell is rejected without changing the board. Source, container, and rock cells cannot be toggled. The fixed terrain is part of the puzzle information; the correct subset is not marked in the DOM, accessible labels, test attributes, hidden text, or pre-release feedback. Only a real Release evaluates whether the chosen channel captures water.

Failed attempts use normalized layout signatures. A signature is the sorted set of open channel cell indices, so the order used to dig the same layout does not create a new failure. Releasing an identical failed layout again preserves one recorded failure. Releasing a second different failed layout deadlocks the run and requires Restart. Editing after the first failure keeps that failure history but clears the old path display. A successful layout clears failure history before the next fixed level begins.

Success remains visible until the player chooses Next Level. This gives the player time to inspect the actual flow path, six particle markers, 6/6 container result, and 200-point award before the board changes. On the fifth success, Finish Game records the exact 1,000-point completion. Completed, captured-awaiting-advance, and deadlocked states freeze inappropriate edits and releases. Invalid cell indices, rock cells, duplicate internal layouts, over-budget digs, malformed state, and terminal actions are rejected atomically.

The five boards were authored specifically for Lizely. An independent literal oracle records one five-cell solution for each level without importing a solution property from the production level table. Tests exhaust every subset of each level's eight diggable cells up to the five-cell budget and prove that exactly one layout captures the required water. Removing any solution cell fails. Separate near-miss fixtures prove a blocked route and two bottom leaks. The production level objects contain source, target, diggable cells, and budget only; they do not store solution or correctness markers.

All dimensions, grid geometry, priorities, particle count, source and target positions, container opening, score, and failure policy are product-authored game rules. The word water is a visual theme for a cellular routing puzzle. The board is not calibrated to real liquid volume, pressure, viscosity, surface tension, pipe diameter, terrain permeability, gravity, drainage, flood behavior, plumbing capacity, or elapsed time. It must not be used to predict, design, or assess any real hydraulic system.

Mouse and touch players tap soil cells and press Release Water. Keyboard players Tab through the eight real buttons, press Enter or Space to toggle a channel, then Tab to Release. Each interactive soil cell is at least 44 by 44 CSS pixels, and the seven-column board fits within a 320-pixel width for a 390-pixel mobile viewport. Keyboard behavior relies on native focused buttons rather than a page-wide listener, so arrows and activation keys on other controls keep their standard behavior.

Everything runs in the browser. Channel layouts, flow paths, failures, and scores are not uploaded. The shared game shell may store the best completed score locally when browser storage is available; blocked storage simply removes that convenience. No account, paid service, network calculation, package dependency, sensor, or file access is needed. Restart recreates the exact initial level-one state, while the shared double-Escape boss screen hides the board without changing channels, failures, flow, level, or score.

Methodology & sources

Model each authored board as 49 row-major cells. Accept a sorted unique subset of no more than five indices from that level's eight-cell diggable set. Starting at the source, move synchronously to the first open candidate in strict down, down-left, down-right order. Before the last row, no candidate means blocked. On the last channel row, only the cell directly above the target captures all six particles; another column leaks. Exhaustively enumerate every diggable subset of size zero through five for each level and require exactly one capturing layout matching an independent literal oracle. Remove every solution cell in turn and require failure. Additional fixtures pin blocked and leaked outcomes, full five-level 200-point progression to 1,000, sorted-layout failure deduplication, second-distinct-layout deadlock, budget enforcement, invalid-state atomicity, terminal freeze, and exact Restart. These are original product rules with no real-world fluid calibration or external reference claims.

Frequently asked questions

Is this a real fluid simulation?
No. The 7 by 7 geometry, movement priority, particle count, container opening, and all values are product-authored grid rules, not calibrated physics or hydraulic guidance.
Why did the water leak beside the container?
The tank catches only a vertical drop from the cell directly above its opening. A path reaching another final-row column exits through the bottom and captures zero.
Can I solve the puzzle with a keyboard?
Yes. Tab to a soil-cell button, use Enter or Space to toggle it, then Tab to Release Water. Every soil control is a native focused button.

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