If you are perfectly comfortable sinking into the sofa with a standard, mind-numbing mobile game that practically plays itself, you might want to look away now. The mobile gaming market is absolutely flooded with titles expertly engineered to drain your wallet rather than test your skills. They throttle your progress, sell you energy bars, and hide actual strategy behind pay-to-win mechanics and endless loot boxes.
Sanshui: Poker Puzzle (三水) is built to be the exact opposite. It is a pure, unadulterated logic puzzle designed to challenge strategy purists and speedrunners alike. It takes the classic mathematical beauty of Mậu Binh (Chinese Poker) and turns it into a dynamic brain-burner where the board actively fights back. This is an all-ages logic puzzle. There is no gambling, no predatory algorithms, and absolutely no way to buy a victory. You either see the optimal line, or you simply don't.
The foundation is beautifully simple. You are dealt exactly 13 cards. Your objective is to arrange those cards into three distinct scaling rows, known as "waters." You build a 3-card front water, a 5-card middle water, and a 5-card back water. The golden rule—the absolute law of the board—is that each row must be at least as strong as the one in front of it. Your middle water must beat your front, and your back water must beat your middle. If you miscalculate and violate this rule, your entire hand fouls.
If that was the whole game, it would be a brilliant, relaxing brain-teaser to play with a cuppa. But the board refuses to sit still. Enter the Token Drop.
Every single round, game-altering tokens plummet onto the board, aggressively mutating the rows they touch. A hand that was mathematically flawless a second ago can suddenly become a foul, forcing you to recalculate your entire strategy in a fraction of a second. You have to adapt to the chaos. Adders grant a specific water an extra card, breaking the standard math. Blocks act as snipers, brutally removing the highest card in your row. Hazards are absolute disasters—they instantly void an entire water, demanding immediate damage control. Spy and Swap tokens force a tactical trade of cards with your opponent, ripping away your safety net. And when you are backed into a corner, Flush and Straight tokens serve as emergency bailouts to entirely rewrite a struggling row.
Every player gets the exact same odds on every token drop. More importantly, every single puzzle you face is checked by our engine to be 100% solvable. If you foul, it isn't the game being unfair; it is because you missed the critical path.
You can master the waters in three ways: • Puzzle Mode: Face endless challenges where an adaptive AI coach monitors your play, seamlessly scaling the difficulty from Apprentice to the deepest Master tiers. • Timed Mode: The speedrunner’s arena. Race a ruthless clock to build your "Presence"—your longest unbroken solving streak. One mistake kills the run. • Shen Mode: A white-knuckle boss fight. Survive a chaotic 10-second curse window before a frantic 35-second sprint against Master Shen, scored water by water.
The full premium game officially launches on December 23, 2026, at 19:00 EST (which is exactly midnight GMT for the UK couch potatoes!). But we need players to start testing the waters right now.
Here is the deal: Head over to our browser version at fourstreetplo.com to play the free, permanent demo covering the first 50 levels. While you are inside the game, submit your email address. The first 5000 people to sign up will secure a promo code to unlock the FULL premium game release absolutely free on launch day. Additionally, if you sign up to be an Android tester you will get the full unlocked game free, weeks before launch. Keep an eye on the in-game messages for crucial updates.
Master the waters today: fourstreetplo.com. The board is waiting.
Swim Higher!
