Star Bolts

The core constraint

Star Bolts is a sorting puzzle with one decisive rule: there are always fewer bins than colours. You can only take the top bolt of a stack, and a bin pops when it holds three bolts of the same colour. With too few bins to give every colour its own, each bin you open is a commitment, and filling bins with mixed colours is how boards become stuck.

That makes an empty bin the scarcest thing on the board. Every level is hand-verified as solvable, so the question is always which colour deserves each bin and in what order the stacks should be dug out.

Read the stacks before you start

Before your first tap, look at what is under the top bolt of each stack, not just the top itself. New colours often hide deeper down, and a colour that seems rare at the top may have several more bolts buried below. Counting how many of each colour you can see, and where, tells you which colours you can finish quickly and which will need patience.

Colours with two bolts already reachable are the best starting point. Opening a bin for them and filling it straight away pops it and gives the space back, so the bin effectively costs nothing.

Chains and combos

Pops can chain: finishing one bin often uncovers the bolts needed to finish another. The most satisfying moves are ones where a single unscrew reveals a colour you were waiting for. Planning for these chains means occasionally leaving a stack alone because you know what sits underneath, and coming back to it once a bin is ready to receive it.

When to use the spare bin

The watch-an-ad spare bin adds exactly the resource the whole puzzle is short of, so it is powerful. It is best kept for a board that is genuinely stuck rather than one that is merely awkward. The Daily Challenge is the same puzzle for every player, which makes it a good benchmark for how far your planning has come.

The puzzle family it belongs to

Sorting puzzles with limited spare space are an old idea in new clothes. The Tower of Hanoi, a puzzle published in 1883, asks you to move a stack of discs between three pegs without ever placing a larger disc on a smaller one, and railway shunting puzzles ask you to reorder wagons using a short siding. In each case the spare space is the real constraint, just as the scarce bins are in Star Bolts.

The shared lesson is to treat the free space as precious and to empty it again quickly. A spare bin that sits half full for many moves is effectively lost, while one that is filled and cleared fast keeps your options open for the rest of the level.

Why stepping away helps

If a level has you completely stuck, putting it down for a while is often the quickest route to the answer. Psychologists call this incubation: a break from a problem tends to help people find a solution when they return, and reviews of many studies have found the effect to be real, though modest. One likely reason is that a break lets you drop a fixed approach that was not working.

Coming back fresh, it often helps to look at the board as if for the first time and count how many bolts of each colour are visible and how deeply each is buried. The plan that seemed impossible ten minutes ago can suddenly look obvious.

Is Star Bolts free?

Yes, it is free to play, supported by ads with an optional spare-bin reward. It is out now on Google Play.

Is every level solvable?

Yes. Every level is hand-verified to be solvable, so a win always comes down to smart sorting.

Do I need to sign in?

No. Guest play always works and stays offline. Sign in only if you want cloud save and cross-device sync.