1. Count before you commit
Found a category? Count how many tiles fit it. If the answer is five or six, at least one of them is a decoy sitting in another group. Work out which before you submit, not after.
Create four groups of four!
Create four groups of four!
Sixteen words. Four hidden groups of four. Find them all before you run out of mistakes.
Each group has a colour, and the colours are a difficulty rating:
| Yellow | The most straightforward group. |
| Green | A small step up. |
| Blue | Takes some lateral thinking. |
| Purple | The trickiest — usually wordplay: hidden words, homophones, fill-in-the-blanks. |
Every board is built to mislead. A word will often look like it belongs to two groups, and five or six tiles will seem to fit a category that only has room for four. Each tile belongs to exactly one group — the puzzle is working out which.
Today's puzzle is the same for every player and changes at midnight. Practice puzzles come from the archive whenever you want more, and are kept separate from your daily record.
You only get four mistakes, so the game is less about spotting groups than about knowing when you are sure enough to submit.
Found a category? Count how many tiles fit it. If the answer is five or six, at least one of them is a decoy sitting in another group. Work out which before you submit, not after.
The tile that fits nowhere obvious is the most useful one on the board. It belongs to exactly one group, so whatever category it does fit is probably the real one. Groups with no plausible decoys are the safest to lock in early.
As a noun, a verb, the start of a phrase and the end of one. STOOL, CLAY, HOMING and CARRIER are just four unrelated words until you add PIGEON. Say the words aloud, too — homophones and hidden words hide from the eye but not the ear.
One away means exactly three of your four belong together. Do not rebuild the guess from scratch: swap out the tile you were least sure of, and if that is still one away, swap in a different one. Two swaps is usually enough.
Your eye pairs up tiles that happen to sit next to each other. A shuffle breaks those pairings and costs nothing.
Stuck? Reveal a category gives away the name of one group you have not found yet, easiest first. It does not tell you which tiles belong to it. Hints are noted on your results but do not stop a game counting.
The daily puzzle is numbered and shared by everyone. When you finish it, your mistake count goes into the distribution under Your progress, and a win keeps your streak going. Practice puzzles are drawn from the archive and tallied on their own, so they never affect the streak.
When a game ends, Share results copies a grid of coloured squares — one row per guess, one square per tile in the colour of the group it really belonged to — without giving away any words.
| Tab / ← ↑ ↓ → | Move around the tiles |
| Space | Select or deselect the focused tile |
| Enter | Submit once four tiles are selected |
| S | Shuffle |
| D | Deselect all |
| H | Reveal a category |
| ? | Open this guide |
| Esc | Close this guide |
The game, your preferences and your progress live in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere, and there is nothing to sign into — which also means progress does not follow you to another device, and clearing site data resets it.
All four groups.