01 What is Decant?
Decant is a minimalist, browser-based logic puzzle designed to be a quiet moment in your day. Unlike fast-paced arcade games, Decant asks you to slow down, analyze the board, and carefully plan your moves. Your objective is simple: sort the colored liquids into their proper vessels.
What sets Decant apart from other liquid-sorting puzzles is color mixing. Primary colors — red, blue, and yellow — can be poured together to create secondary colors. Red and blue make purple. Blue and yellow make green. Red and yellow make orange. This single mechanic transforms what could be a straightforward sorting exercise into something that requires real forward planning.
A solved Decant puzzle looks obvious in hindsight. Getting there is the satisfying part.
The game is free to play in your browser with no download or account required. Daily puzzle results can be shared with a simple emoji grid — the same format as Wordle and similar daily games.
02 How to Play
The rules of Decant are straightforward, but mastering them requires careful foresight:
- Selecting and Pouring: Click a vessel to select it, then click another to pour. You can only pour a liquid onto a matching color, or into an empty vessel. You cannot pour into a full vessel.
- Color Mixing: This is where Decant stands apart. Certain primary colors can be mixed together to create secondary colors. Red and blue combine to make purple. Blue and yellow make green. Red and yellow make orange. The resulting mixed color can then be poured like any other.
- Vessel Capacity: Every tube has a specific capacity. You cannot overflow a vessel, so calculating your available space before each pour is critical — especially in the later, more complex puzzles.
- Deadlocks: It's possible to reach a state where no valid move exists. This happens most often when colors are arranged in a way that blocks each other from being separated. If you get stuck, the undo button lets you step back one move at a time.
The fundamental skill in Decant is thinking in reverse. Look at where each color needs to end up and work backward from there, identifying which pours need to happen in which order to create the space required.
03 Daily and Endless Modes
Decant offers two distinct ways to play, designed for different moods and amounts of time.
Daily Mode provides a single, handcrafted puzzle every 24 hours. Every player in the world plays the exact same board on any given day. This shared experience is part of the appeal — you can compare your solution with friends, discuss strategies, and track your streak over time. The daily puzzle is designed to be completable in a reasonable sitting, though the pour count you achieve is where the skill shows. The leaderboard ranks players by fewest pours, rewarding efficient solutions over brute-force ones.
Endless Mode offers a vast progression map of increasingly difficult puzzles. Starting with simple two-color boards, the difficulty curves gradually upward — more vessels, more colors, tighter constraints, and more reliance on the color-mixing mechanic. There's no time pressure and no failure state beyond getting stuck, making it a good mode for learning the game's deeper logic without the stakes of the daily leaderboard.
04 Colorblind Accessibility
Decant includes a colorblind mode that overlays symbols on each liquid color — a different shape for each color — so that no mechanic depends solely on color perception. The mode can be toggled in the game's settings at any time and persists between sessions.
This was a deliberate design decision made early in development, not an afterthought. A puzzle game built around color that excludes colorblind players isn't really accessible — the symbols ensure that the full game is playable by everyone, regardless of how they perceive color.
05 Tips for Solving Harder Puzzles
Once you've got the basics down, these approaches make the harder puzzles more manageable:
- Identify your target colors first. Before making any move, count how many vessels of each color you'll need and compare that to what's on the board. This tells you immediately which colors need to be mixed and which need to be split.
- Create empty vessels deliberately. An empty vessel is the most flexible space on the board. Sometimes the right move is to drain a vessel of a color you don't immediately need, just to open up a workspace.
- Mix early, not late. Creating a secondary color early in a solve tends to open more options than leaving it for the end. Late-game mixes often require space you no longer have.
- Think in layers, not individual pours. A tube with three layers of liquid requires three separate pours to empty. Plan around that — trying to move it all at once leads to partial pours that block other moves.
- Use undo freely. Undo doesn't penalize your score in Endless Mode. It's there to encourage experimentation. Try a pour, see what it does, undo if it doesn't help. The best solvers treat undo as a tool for exploration, not a sign of failure.