Infection spreads cell to cell through the tank's shared water, and your only tool is a handful of glass dividers to cut the flow before it reaches your fish.
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How to play
Quarantine Aquarium is a graph-cut containment puzzle. The pathogen starts at one or more source cells and floods to every connected water cell each tick. You have a limited budget of glass dividers, each placed on the edge between two adjacent cells, to slice the water graph and isolate the outbreak. Keep enough fish alive when the spread settles and you win.
Click an edge between two water cells to drop a glass divider that blocks the infection from crossing it.
Click the same edge again to remove a divider and re-plan; you only have so many to spend.
Use Step to advance the spread one tick at a time, or Auto to run it out, watching where the flood goes.
Win by keeping fish losses within the level's limit; lose if too many fish are infected.
Controls
Desktop: click an edge between two water cells to place or remove a divider; buttons handle Step, Auto, Reset and New.
Phone & tablet: tap the edge between cells to wall it off, placement is fully pointer-driven.
Tips & strategy
Look for the narrowest neck in the water, a couple of dividers across a chokepoint seal far more than a sprawling wall.
Sometimes sacrificing the fish nearest the source is the cheaper cut; the level lets you lose a few and still win.
Reset to rewind the flood and try a new wall layout without spending a new level.
Game modes
Daily: a shared seeded tank each day at your chosen size.
Practice: fresh randomized tanks at 6x6, 8x8 or 10x10.
Origins
The spread is a flood fill: from a source, into every connected cell, one tick at a time.
The defence is the matching piece of theory. Placing glass dividers on the edges between cells to sever the outbreak from the rest of the tank is a minimum cut — the cheapest set of edges whose removal disconnects a graph.
Pairing them is the design. Flood fill and minimum cut are duals of each other, so the puzzle has a provable best answer rather than a merely good one, and a budget of dividers one short of that answer is a level you cannot win by playing well.
About Quarantine Aquarium
Quarantine Aquarium is an original free browser game that turns flood-fill and minimum-cut graph theory into a tense containment puzzle. Built in-house for PlayPendium.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
