Candy Sort: Merge Puzzle

How the board works

Candy Sort: Merge Puzzle gives you a row of columns, each one able to hold a short stack of candies. Every candy carries a number and a shape — round, jelly, oval — and dropping matching candies into the same column merges them automatically into the next number up, no separate merge button or confirmation tap required.

That automatic-merge rule is the whole hook: you're not solving a puzzle so much as managing space, deciding which column to feed next so you don't run out of slots before you've cleared enough stacks to make room again.

Progress and levels

Progress is tracked with a star meter and a small set of milestone levels shown along the top of the screen, and in the round we played, a heart-shaped "9" super-stack appeared mid-level with a starburst effect — evidently a rarer, higher-value piece that's worth prioritising when it shows up.

Several of the five columns started locked, each needing either an in-game currency payment or a short wait timer to open. Only one or two columns were free to use from the very start of the level we tested.

Small details we liked

The interface below the sorting grid includes a small set of one-tap utility tools — a swap, a propeller-hat item, a magnet — each shown with a simple counter for how many charges you have left, which keeps their use readable without extra menus to dig through.

Because there's no timer pressure on the sort itself, you can study the column layout for as long as you want before committing to a move — a genuinely different pace from the swap-and-clear games in the Match-3 Puzzle hub.

Where it drags

The locked-column structure is the biggest friction point: with most columns unavailable from the start, a meaningful chunk of each level is spent working around limited space rather than solving the sorting puzzle the game is actually built on.

A trade screen labelled Deal and Sell, with its own coin counter, takes up a large share of the interface between rounds — more real estate than the sorting board itself gets in some views, which feels like a mismatch for a game whose core idea is genuinely simple.

Bottom line

Candy Sort: Merge Puzzle has a clean, honestly satisfying core mechanic buried under more locked-slot friction than it needs. If you can look past the columns you can't use yet, the automatic-merge sorting itself is a calm, unhurried five minutes.