ft09 — ARC-AGI-3 game guide

Level 1

• Click a tile (a solid 3x3 colored square) to move it to the next color in the level's color list. After the last color it wraps back to the first. Each tile click costs 1 from the budget.
• Clicking anything that is not a tile (a marker, a gap, the background, the color swatches) does nothing and costs nothing.
• Clicking is the only action. There is no undo. RESET restarts the level with a full budget.
• Markers are small 3x3 squares set in among the tiles. The center color is the target. Each of the eight border cells points at the neighboring tile on that side, diagonals included.
• A white border cell means the tile on that side must be the target color. A gray border cell means that tile must be any other color. Two markers can share a tile, and then both rules apply to it.
• The level is won the moment every marker is satisfied at once, and the next level loads straight away. The click that solves it does not use up budget.
• The bottom row is the click bar: orange for what is left, yellow for what you have spent. Budgets are 32, 32, 96, 96, 128 and 128 tile clicks, refilled at each new level. Hit zero before the board is solved and you lose.
• On level 1, clicking outside the tiles (anywhere but a tile or the marker) makes the gray corner brackets around the real puzzle flash white twice, pointing you at it. It costs nothing.
• Level 1 is a lesson: three solved example boards, each a ring of tiles around a marker, and the real puzzle in the lower right inside gray corner brackets. It uses blue and red only.

Level 2

• More than one marker on a board, so tiles between two markers have to suit both.
• Small color swatches at the top right list the level's colors in click order. The first swatch is the color every tile starts in.

Level 3

Level 4

• Three colors in the cycle (blue, red, orange), so a tile can take two clicks to reach the color you want.

Level 5

• Dark gray border cells on a marker: there is no tile on that side, so there is nothing to check there.
• Tiles with pink dots on their edges. Clicking one recolors it and every neighboring tile a pink dot points at, each one step along the color list. Level 5 has three of these, each with four dots (up, down, left, right).

Level 6

• Every tile on level 6 has one pink dot on its top edge, so each click recolors that tile and the tile directly above it (if there is one).