A colour puzzle like Pixel Flood packs six colours into a few hundred squares. When you're new, most of your time goes on hunting: "where's the yellow? is that a big yellow patch or three small ones?"
You can't make your eyes faster. You can look in better places, though. Here are three habits that help. None of them is magic, but together they make the board much easier to read.
1. Only look at your edge
In Pixel Flood, the only squares that matter this move are the ones touching your patch. Everything deeper in the board can wait.
So stop scanning the whole grid. Run your eyes along the border of your area and count what's there: "four greens, a yellow run, two purples". That's a much smaller job, and it's all the information your next move needs. The game helps too: the +N under each colour button is the count of squares you'd add along that edge.
2. Sort the colours into two groups
Six colours at once is a lot to keep in your head. Split them into two groups instead, warm (pink, orange, yellow) and cool (blue, green, purple), and ask one question first: is the area ahead of me mostly warm or mostly cool?
That cuts what you need to compare roughly in half. It isn't a law of vision, just a filing trick, and it works because the brain is better at holding a few groups than many separate things.
3. Squint
This one sounds silly, and it works. Narrow your eyes until the board blurs. The small single squares fade out and the big patches of colour stay. Those big patches are what you want to steer toward.
The same board, sharp and blurred. Blurred, the single squares disappear and the large patches (and the paths between them) are much easier to spot.
Artists use the same trick to check the light and dark areas of a painting without getting lost in detail. In a flood puzzle, it shows you the "roads" of one colour that cut across the board.
Putting it together
A move in Pixel Flood then looks like this:
- Squint to find the big patch you want to reach next.
- Trace your edge toward it and see which colours are in the way.
- Pick the colour that moves you toward that patch. Use the +N numbers to break ties.
You'll still get stuck sometimes. That's the puzzle. But you'll spend your thinking on choices instead of on searching.
The same habits help in Laser Nexus, where you follow a beam across a grid of mirrors: trace one path at a time instead of taking in the whole board.
For move-by-move strategy, read How to Beat Pixel Flood With Moves to Spare.