Daily Word Groups

How to play

1. Read all 16 tiles before touching anything — the grid always hides exactly four groups of four, and first impressions are where the traps live.
2. Tap or click the 4 words you think share a category, then press Submit group.
3. A correct set locks in with its category name and color. A wrong set costs one of your 4 tries — and "One away!" tells you exactly 3 of your 4 picks belong together.
4. Solve all four groups before your tries run out, then copy your emoji result to share. The emoji grid shows how you played without spoiling a single answer.

Rules

• One puzzle per day, keyed to midnight UTC — everyone on Earth plays the same board.
• Each of the 16 words belongs to exactly one of the four hidden groups; there is always a single valid solution.
• Four wrong submissions end the round, and the unsolved groups are revealed.
• Submitting an identical wrong combination twice is blocked, so re-testing a theory never wastes a try.
• Colors mark difficulty: green is the most literal category, amber and blue need narrower associations, and purple is the trickster — usually a pattern rather than a topic.

Scoring & streaks

There is no score to grind. Your result is your mistake count (0–3 on a win) plus your full guess history as an emoji grid; a flawless solve means zero mistakes. Solving the genuine daily board — not an archive replay — extends your day streak, which is stored only on your own device.

Strategy tips

• Lock in the group you are most certain of first: every solved row removes four tiles from the search space.
• Treat "obvious" words with suspicion. A word that fits two themes almost always belongs to the sneakier one, because the obvious theme's real fourth member is hiding elsewhere in the grid.
• After a "One away!", swap one word at a time instead of rebuilding the whole guess — you are three-quarters right already.
• If the last four words look completely unrelated, stop looking for a topic and start looking for a pattern: a shared missing word (___ STONE), hidden words inside them, or anagrams of each other.
• Say stubborn words out loud. Homophone and hidden-word tricks are far easier to hear than to see.

Difficulty

A typical board takes 2–6 minutes. Green groups are direct categories most players spot in seconds; amber and blue expect a narrower association, like sorting kitchen tools from drafting tools; purple is built on wordplay and misdirection, so even strong solvers lose a try to it. The daily boards do not get harder through the week — every day is a fresh, self-contained challenge.

Controls

• Mouse or touch: tap a tile to select or deselect it; Submit group activates once exactly 4 tiles are selected.
• Keyboard: move between tiles with Tab and toggle them with Enter or Space — every tile is a real button.
• Shuffle rearranges the remaining tiles visually (sometimes a new layout breaks a mental rut); Deselect clears your current picks.

Accessibility

Keyboard play works end-to-end without a mouse, game announcements (correct group, tries left, one-away hints) are pushed to screen readers through a polite live region, and solved groups always show their category name in text so color is never the only signal. Both light and dark themes keep readable contrast, and the board scales down to small phone screens without horizontal scrolling.