New game: BoltGlyph, a nut sort puzzle
There is a machine shop in the GlyphVerse now. BoltGlyph is a sorting puzzle: a bench of bolts, each threaded with a jumble of coloured hex nuts, and two empty bolts to work with. Lift the nuts off the top of one bolt and thread them onto another, until every bolt holds four nuts of a single colour.
It is the most tactile thing on the site. The nuts lift when you pick them up, arc across the bench and screw down onto their new bolt with a ratchet click, and a finished bolt caps itself with a clunk. Every nut also carries a glyph, a heart, a bolt of lightning, a moon, a Σ, so you can play by shape as well as by colour.
The rules
- A nut can only go onto an empty bolt or onto a nut of the same colour.
- A bolt holds four nuts. Matching nuts on top travel together, as many as fit.
- You win when every bolt is either empty or full of one colour.
Every level is solvable. Provably.
Random sorting puzzles have a dirty secret: some deals cannot be solved at all, and you only find out after twenty minutes of trying. BoltGlyph's 300 levels were each dealt from a fixed seed, solved by a search program before they shipped, and the solution was then replayed move by move under the game's own rules. A level that could not be proven solvable was thrown away. A second, independent pass re-solved every level from scratch before release.
So if a board feels impossible, it is the board you have made, not the level. Undo is unlimited, and the one hint you get per level is smart about it: from a stuck position it tells you exactly how many moves to undo to get back onto a winning line.
Levels, stars and a daily bolt
The levels climb from three colours to fifteen, with a harder level every tenth and an expert one every twenty-fifth. Finish at or under par for three stars; using the hint caps a level at two. Your unlocked levels, stars and the board you were halfway through are all saved on your device, so you can close the tab mid-level and pick it up later.
There is also a daily bolt: one ten-colour board, the same for everyone, reset at midnight UTC, with a streak and a shareable result.
Three habits that clear most boards
- Protect an empty bolt. It is your workbench. Fill it only when the move finishes something.
- Finish one colour before starting another. A half-built bolt blocks two colours at once.
- Look for nuts buried under a single other colour. One move frees them.
