Moves 0
Fewest possible 6
Best –
How to play
Goal
Measure out an exact amount of water using jugs that have no markings: get the target amount into any one jug.
How it works
- Pour: tap one jug, then another. Water pours from the first into the second until the first is empty or the second is full.
- Fill and Empty: on levels with a tap, each jug has Fill and Empty buttons. On levels without a tap, the water you start with is all you have.
- The number on each jug is how much water it holds now; the number below is how much it can hold.
- Each pour, fill or empty is one move. Try to match the fewest possible.
Tips
- A full jug poured into a smaller one leaves the difference behind. With jugs of 5 and 3, filling the 5 and pouring into the 3 leaves exactly 2.
- Keep a pattern going: fill the big jug, pour into the small one, empty the small one, pour again. This cycles through every amount you can make.
- You can only make amounts that are multiples of the largest number dividing both jug sizes, so think about which jug sizes work together.
The history of Water Jugs
Pouring puzzles appear in the work of Italian mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia in the 1500s, who asked how to split 8 measures of wine fairly using jugs of 5 and 3. Similar riddles were told even earlier, and the puzzle became famous again in the 1995 film Die Hard with a Vengeance.