The Doppit Almanac · No. 01

Aquait, a daily Aquarium puzzle

Fill tanks to match the water counts

What it is

Aquait is Doppit's edition of the water puzzle collectors file under Aquarium. The board is a grid of outlined tanks, there is a count against every row and column, and one law of physics is enforced without appeal: water settles flat, fills from the floor up, and never floats.

It opens the almanac at No. 01, and it plays the way good bookkeeping feels. Every drop is accounted for before the ledger closes.

How it plays

The whole game is three habits of water, plus a note for your margins.

• Each tank holds a single water line. Every cell below the line is wet, and every cell above it stays dry.
• Water lies level. Fill one cell and every cell at the same height in that tank fills with it.
• The edge counts fix how many water cells each row and each column must hold.
• Air dots are your own marks for dry cells. The win is judged on the water alone.

The difficulties

Three tiers hang on the daily peg. Expert hangs beside them, for practice only. Easy pours out in thirty seconds to a minute. Medium asks one to three minutes of steady counting. Hard runs three to six and makes you earn the last tank. Expert is hard's own twelve-wide board under a stricter rule: eleven separate rounds of supposing a tank stopped at some other water line and following the counts until one breaks, where hard usually wants five. A new board is set every day, and it costs nothing.

Nearby in the almanac: Islandit, Yinit and Nonit