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Neo Flood
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About This Game

Neo Flood is a color-flooding strategy puzzle. You start in the top-left corner of the board. Each turn, you pick one of six colors from the picker at the bottom. Your whole region changes to that color and instantly pulls in every touching cell that matches, growing your territory in a wave. Your goal is to flood the whole board before your turns run out.

The game has six modes. Daily Puzzle uses a 14×14 board with 6 colors and 25 turns — finish it and your score goes on the leaderboard. Easy is a 10×10 board with 5 colors and 25 turns. Medium is 14×14 with 6 colors and 25 turns. Hard is 16×16 with only 22 turns. Endless mode starts at 8×8 with 4 colors and gets bigger as you clear each level. Two-Player mode puts a second player in the bottom-right corner on the same 14×14 board. You each build outward, and whoever controls more cells when the board is full wins. Every cell has a shape — circle, square, triangle, diamond, hexagon, or star — so colorblind players can tell tiles apart by shape alone.

Screenshot

Neo Flood — gameplay screenshot
Neo Flood running in the browser — exactly what you'll see when you hit Play.

History & Background

Flood fill is a basic computer graphics operation. It's what the 'paint bucket' tool does — it colors all connected same-colored pixels from a starting point. That idea went mainstream in paint software in the 1980s. The puzzle version — giving players a limited number of color picks to flood a whole grid from a corner — grew into a casual browser and mobile genre in the late 2000s.

Flood-It, released by LabPixies for Google Gadgets in 2008, is the game most credited with setting the modern flood puzzle format. It was later ported to iOS and became popular there. The key insight is that you can't just grab the most cells each turn — you have to think ahead about which color grows your frontier the most over the next few turns. Researchers have even shown that finding the minimum number of moves to flood any board is NP-hard in general, though human intuition gets pretty close on normal-sized boards.

Neo Flood adds six game modes, a two-player territory version, shape-coded tiles for accessibility, animated wave expansion, and EchoForge leaderboard support for the daily puzzle.

How to Play

  1. Your region starts at the top-left corner (Player 2 starts bottom-right in 2P mode)
  2. Each turn, tap a colored shape from the picker at the bottom of the screen
  3. Your entire region changes to that color and absorbs all touching cells of the same color
  4. The absorbed cells become part of your region, expanding your frontier for the next turn
  5. In 2P mode, you cannot pick your own current color or your opponent's current color
  6. Flood the entire board before turns run out to win — in Endless mode, clearing a board advances you to the next level automatically
  7. Daily Puzzle uses a seed tied to today's date — everyone plays the same board
  8. Check the Owned % in the HUD to track your progress each turn

Tips & Strategy

Pick the color that stretches your frontier the farthest, not just the one that grabs the most cells right now.
Think two or three turns ahead. A color that exposes a big cluster next turn can beat a big grab this turn.
On hard boards, break into isolated color clusters early before they get cut off from your region.
In two-player mode, picking a color that blocks your opponent's growth is sometimes worth more than growing yourself.
In Endless mode, the board resets each level. Use the easy early levels to get your pattern recognition warmed up.
The shapes map one-to-one to colors. Use them to plan your moves if colors are hard to tell apart on your screen.

Features

Six game modes: Daily Puzzle, Endless, Easy, Medium, Hard, and 2 Player
Boards from 8×8 (Endless level 1) up to 18×18 (Endless level 29+)
Six color-shape pairs for colorblind accessibility
Animated wave expansion with staggered BFS reveal
Daily leaderboard with score based on turns used
Personal bests saved locally for Easy, Medium, Hard, and Endless
Progress auto-saved mid-game on daily puzzle
Hot-seat 2-player territory battle on a shared board

Controls

Desktop

Click a colored shape in the picker bar to choose your color for the turn.

Mobile

Tap a colored shape in the picker bar at the bottom of the screen.


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