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4 pegs aren't too bad. There's a few strategies to start them and once you've gotten a few eliminations the rest tends to go pretty smooth.

Here's an example...

The easiest kinds of clues to act on in this case will be clues where you have three colors marked as either correct or out of place and two or more matching colors. If you have something like that you can immediately say - "I know the color that I have two of is at least *in* the answer" -- so from here you'll drag that color into one of your hint trackers.

In our first hint, we match this condition, so we immediately know we have a red in the final answer. We don't really know how many just yet or where they are though.

Because we know we have a red, we can now look for clues where one red satisfies all the dots / hearts. Since we know we have a red, the fourth clue can't contain anything else, so we eliminate blue and purple. The last clue also has a red and a single heart, so we can eliminate green as well. So mark all blues, greens, and purples out of the board.

At this point we already know for certain that we have at least two reds because we eliminated everything but red in clues 4 and 5 and the hearts indicate that the red is in the right place both times. Since there are two different spots that are correct between the two clues we can conclude that position 2 and position 3 are both red.

Additionally, we eliminated everything in clue 3 except for one brown. Since that clue also contains a single heart, we know that position 4 is brown.

Here we can look at clue 2 -- we already have a red and a brown in the solution, so we know that everything else in here is wrong. Since the other items in this clue are an extra brown and a purple (not important, but we already elimated purple) we can go ahead and eliminate the possibility of a second brown.

So now we know that the last color can't be green, brown, blue, or purple. The only color left that our last piece can be is another red. So the answer contains three reds and one brown. 

The only open position right now is 1, so go ahead and toss that last red in there and we are done.

Red, Red, Red, Brown

Obviously not all four piece puzzles are going to work out this way. Sometimes finding early eliminations is a lot trickier. But once you get into the mindset of how to hunt for them it becomes second nature. So much so that it's actually kinda harder to describe the method than it is to actually do it.

FYI, whenever you serve an order at the cafe it takes twice your ingredients due to a coding error. First it takes one when you put it on the plate and then it takes one when you submit the order.

I find myself wishing I could rotate counterclockwise frequently even if it probably makes little difference. That said most tetris rules don't apply here since stuff like wall kicking and pivot rules don't really apply in a sandy environment.

I really think there should be a 15-30 frame buffer after placing a block where your piece doesn't move but the sand continues to settle. And maybe the easiest difficulty should have the block moving at roughly the same speed as the sand settles instead of roughly twice as fast.

EDIT: Also a similar pause to block falling while sifting continues during a match clear would make a big difference in game feel.