A sorting puzzle built on misdirection
Word Groups gives you sixteen words and asks you to split them into four sets of four. Each set shares a hidden link. Some links are plain categories, such as types of bread. Others are wordplay: words that follow the same word, words that fit a blank, or words that are anagrams of each other.
The puzzle is hard because the setter plants overlaps on purpose. You will often see five or six words that seem to fit one theme. Only four of them belong there, and the extras are needed somewhere else. Most of the skill lies in spotting those decoys before they cost you a mistake.
Look before you tap
Resist the urge to submit the first four words that seem to match. Instead, spend a minute reading the whole grid and listing every link you notice, even weak ones.
- Count how many words fit each idea. If a theme has exactly four candidates, it is a strong submission. If it has five or more, at least one word is a decoy.
- Check every word for a second meaning. A word that can be a noun, a verb and part of a phrase is the one most likely to be doing double duty.
- Say short phrases out loud. Groups like "words after FIRE" or "blank cake" are easier to hear than to see.
The Shuffle button, or the S key, rearranges the tiles that are still unsolved. It does not change the answer, but it breaks up accidental pairings that your eye keeps grouping together.
Working from certainty
You do not have to solve the groups in colour order. Yellow is usually the most direct link and purple the trickiest, but the right group to submit first is whichever one you are surest of.
Here is a worked example of how decoys play out. Suppose the grid shows LEMON, LIME, ORANGE, GRAPEFRUIT and PEPPER. That is five things you might slice in a kitchen, so one of them belongs elsewhere. Now look for a second home. PEPPER can be a bell pepper, and if CHURCH, BICYCLE and BOXER are also on the board, they all go with "bell" too. That leaves the four citrus fruits as a clean group. Submitting the fruit group first would also have worked, but noticing the bell group first tells you why PEPPER was there.
Using your four mistakes well
You can make four wrong submissions before the game ends, and the remaining groups are then revealed. Treat them as a budget, not a buffer.
- One away means three are right. When the board says you are one away, three of your four words belong together. Swap out only the word you trust least. Do not change two words at once, or you lose the information.
- Repeats are free. If you submit the exact same four words a second time, the board tells you so and does not count a mistake. This protects you from slips, but it is not a strategy.
- Do not guess to see what happens. A wrong submission that is not one away teaches you very little. Only submit when you can name the link.
- The last group solves itself. Once three groups are found, the final four tiles must be the last set. So the real test is the third group, where the remaining decoys are most tightly packed.
Getting better over time
Each new game deals a random puzzle from the collection, and there is no difficulty setting. Improvement comes from learning the families of links that setters use. After each game, look back at the purple group and name its pattern: a word that comes after, a word that comes before, a hidden word, a sound-alike, or an anagram. The next time you see a word that seems not to fit any category, try each of those patterns in turn.
If colour is hard to tell apart, the settings panel can add a shape to each group, so you can read the solved rows without relying on colour alone.
A good personal goal is to finish with zero mistakes. When you can do that often, aim to solve the purple group first. It forces you to see the wordplay before the plain categories.
