Flood-It Strategy: Clear the Board in Fewer Moves
Flood-It looks like the gentlest puzzle around: tap a colour, watch your corner blob swallow everything matching that touches it, and repeat until the whole grid is one shade. The twist is the move counter - you only have so many taps, so the goal is not just to fill the board but to fill it in as few recolours as you can. That sounds like it rewards greed, always grabbing the biggest gulp, yet the strongest players often take a smaller bite on purpose. This guide covers when greedy wins, when looking ahead wins, and the one rule that quietly limits how good any solution can be, with practice notes tied to Mochi Paint.
How the flood actually moves
Your flood is the single connected patch of one colour that touches your starting corner - in Mochi Paint that is the top-left tile, where a little white mochi sits. Every cell in that patch is "yours." When you tap a tile of a new colour, your whole patch repaints to that colour at once, and any neighbouring tile that now matches gets pulled in. So you never choose a tile to keep; you choose a colour, and your territory grows outward.
The thing to internalise is that you only ever recolour the blob you already own, never loose tiles directly. New ground joins only when it touches your edge and shares the new colour. That is why one colour can be a brilliant move this turn and useless the next: it depends entirely on what is sitting against your border right now.
The greedy move: grab the colour that adds the most
The natural first instinct is the right starting point. Look at every colour touching the edge of your flood, imagine repainting to each one, and pick whichever pulls in the most new tiles. This is the greedy strategy, and it is exactly the rule a computer solver uses as a baseline. It is fast, it is simple, and on open boards with no walls it gets you most of the way home.
Greedy works because surface area compounds. Every tile you absorb lengthens your border, so more colours touch you next turn and your following gulps grow too - the snowball keeps rolling. In Mochi Paint this is not a hidden trick: the game runs a greedy auto-solver over your exact board to set how many paint drops you get, then adds a small cushion. Play tidy greedy and you are already close to the budget the game itself assumed.
Try it honestly: on your next board in Mochi Paint, before each tap name out loud which colour adds the most tiles, then tap it. Tapping a colour you already hold is free, so studying the board never costs a drop - compare options at your leisure.
When looking ahead beats greedy
Pure greed has a blind spot: it only sees this turn. Sometimes the biggest patch now is a dead end, while a smaller grab unlocks a new region that pays off hugely next tap. Picture a thin lane of one colour separating your flood from a large untouched block of a second colour. Greedy ignores the lane because it adds only a few tiles - but take that small bite and your border now touches the big block, so one more tap swallows all of it at once.
That is the heart of high-level Flood-It: a small move now to reach a much larger swallow later. To spot it, stop asking "what is biggest this turn" and start asking "what is biggest over the next two turns combined." When two colours pull in roughly the same count, choose the one that opens a fresh region or connects you to a colour you could not reach before. The tie-breaker is almost always "which move gives me more to grab next."
Push toward the far corner
A positional rule quietly improves almost every game: aim your flood across the board toward the corner farthest from where you started. In Mochi Paint you begin top-left, so your long-term target is the bottom-right.
Why does direction matter when the board has to end up one colour anyway? Because the worst thing you can do is strand a far-off pocket of tiles you then have to circle back and clean up with extra taps. Push the flood outward along its longest diagonal, claiming the cells deepest into enemy territory, and you tend to absorb the remote regions on the way through rather than leaving them behind. So when two moves are otherwise even, take the one that reaches deeper rather than the one that just fattens up ground you already control.
The colour count sets a floor
This is the single most useful fact in the game, and it costs nothing. Look at how many distinct colours are on the board. You need at least one move per colour, because each repaint turns your flood a single shade and the board is not finished until every colour has been folded in. Six colours means roughly six moves minimum, however cleverly you play.
That floor tells you two things. First, it sets a realistic target: on a four-colour board, a four or five move clear is excellent. Second, it explains difficulty - a 5x5 board with four colours is genuinely gentler than a 9x9 with all six, which is exactly why Mochi Paint widens the palette as you climb its worlds. Count the colours before your first tap; that number is your scoreboard.
A quick endgame check: when only two or three colours are left on the whole grid, switch off autopilot. Mochi Paint flashes the drop pip red when you have two or fewer taps to spare, and that is the moment a single wasted recolour costs you the board. Count the remaining colours, plan that exact sequence of taps, then play it.
Routing around walls and dead taps
Some boards add tiles that never change colour and never join your flood - in Mochi Paint these are sleepy grey stones, which appear from the Mint world on. A stone is a wall: it splits the grid into pockets, and your flood has to reach the cells behind it by going around. When stones appear, edit your far-corner instinct slightly - trace the open path the flood can actually travel, and avoid painting yourself into a pocket you will have to back out of.
The expensive mistake here is the "dead tap" - a move that changes nothing because the new colour has nothing against your border, or you tapped a stone or the colour you already are. On a budgeted board that spends nothing but your slack. Mochi Paint is kind about it: re-tapping your own colour is free, and when you stall it pulses a ring around the cells a good move would grab. Treat that hint as a nudge, not a crutch.
A move-by-move routine
Put it together and a board becomes a short, repeatable loop rather than a guessing game:
- Count the colours. That number is your rough move floor and your target to beat.
- Find the greedy move. Identify the colour touching your flood that would absorb the most tiles right now.
- Check one move ahead. Would a smaller bite instead unlock a much bigger region next turn? If so, and the totals are close, take the setup.
- Favour the far corner. When two moves are roughly equal, pick the one that pushes deeper toward the opposite corner so you strand nothing.
- Mind the walls. If stones are present, route along the open path and avoid sealing yourself out of a pocket.
- Plan the last few taps exactly. Once two or three colours remain, stop improvising and lay out the closing sequence.
None of these steps is hard on its own. The skill is doing them in order, every turn, instead of slapping the biggest patch on reflex - and the lovely thing about Flood-It is that there is no clock forcing you to rush the thinking. The fastest solvers are rarely the fastest tappers; they are the ones who let one well-chosen bite set up the next.
Where to go next
Flood-It rewards the same habit as every good puzzle: look before you leap, and value the move that sets up your next move. If you enjoyed planning a few taps ahead, try the same patience on a board that asks you to read shapes and regions - Shikaku and Flow puzzles both reward seeing the whole grid before you commit. And when you want to go from theory back to your fingertips, the fastest teacher is simply another board on Mochi Paint - count the colours, name the greedy move, then ask whether a smaller bite would open something bigger.