Boltnest
by Hadukis
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About
Coloured nuts on bolts. Tap to lift, tap to drop, fill a bolt with one colour and it unscrews itself. Three undos a level, and the ones underneath are face down.
How to play
Tap a nut to lift it, tap a bolt to drop it. Fill a bolt with one colour.
Screenshots
Game details
- Developer
- Hadukis
- Released
- August 25, 2026
- Last updated
- August 19, 2026
- Technology
- HTML5, plays in the browser
- Platforms
- Computer, phone and tablet
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Price
- Free, no account, no download
About Boltnest
Boltnest is a sorting puzzle about working with information you do not have. Coloured nuts sit stacked on bolts; you lift the top one, drop it on another bolt, and a bolt holding a single colour unscrews itself and leaves the board. Clear the board and the level is done.
The catch is that nuts below the top of a stack are face down. You can see what you are holding and what you are dropping it onto, and nothing else — so the first few moves of every level are spent buying information rather than making progress, and a move that looks wasteful is often the only way to see what is underneath.
You get three undos a level, and they are the actual difficulty dial. Three is enough to recover from a genuine misread and not enough to brute-force a board by trying moves to see what turns up. When the undos are gone the level becomes a different game, which is when it is worth slowing down.
Levels are short — a couple of minutes each — and the whole thing is one file that loads instantly on a phone. There is no timer anywhere in it.
Controls
- Tap or click a bolt
- Lift the nut on top of it
- Tap or click a second bolt
- Drop the nut there, if the move is legal
- Tap the same bolt again
- Put the nut back and cancel
- Arrow keys, or W A S D
- Move a cursor between the bolts, for playing without a mouse
- Space or Enter
- Lift or drop at the cursor
- Z or Backspace, or the undo button
- Take back one move. Three per level, and they do not refill
- R
- Restart the level
- M, or the speaker icon
- Mute and unmute; the setting is remembered
- C
- Open the credits
Tips
- Empty a bolt early if you can. An empty bolt is a free place to look under something, and having none is how boards become unsolvable.
- A colour you have seen exactly once is the most valuable thing on the board — it tells you where the other three are not.
- Do not spend an undo on a move that merely turned out badly. Spend it on a move that hid something you had already uncovered.
- When two bolts each hold one nut of the same colour, joining them is usually worse than leaving them: two shallow stacks are two places to put things.
What changed
- Sound now stops properly when the game is paused by the page around it, instead of playing on underneath.
Boltnest is ours — code and art, with nothing borrowed and nothing to clear with anybody else. It can be licensed for your portal.