Flooder

Player notes

About this game

Flooder is a Game Boy Color puzzle game by Oliver Balfour built around the classic flood-fill rule. Every round begins with a randomly mixed board. The connected region in the upper-left corner is the player's territory, and selecting a new color absorbs every adjacent tile of that color. The objective is to make the whole board one connected region before the move counter runs out. A simple choice changes only the current color; a strong choice reaches a large frontier and creates several new contacts for the following turn.

Press Start to leave the title screen. During a round, use the up or left arrow to cycle through the available colors in one direction and down or right to cycle in the other direction. Press X or Z to apply the selected color. Choosing the same color as the current region does not advance the board, so check the selector before confirming. A finished or failed round reports the result and waits for Start before generating another board.

Good play depends on the edge of the flooded region rather than the largest color visible anywhere on the board. Count how many new tiles each candidate color touches now, then consider what those tiles will touch next. A color that gains only two cells can still be correct if it opens routes into two distant clusters. Avoid alternating between two colors without expanding the frontier, and do not spend the final moves collecting isolated pockets one at a time.

For the first several turns, favor moves that spread in more than one direction. Near the end, scan the outer boundary for rare colors and plan an order that prevents them from becoming isolated. Because every board is generated afresh, memorizing a fixed solution is less useful than learning to read connected regions. Flooder is compact enough for short sessions, but the 25-move limit gives each board a clear tactical arc: expand broadly, join large groups, then clean up the remaining edge tiles without wasting a selection.