Quartet

Sixteen words are hidden on the grid. They belong to four groups of four, each sharing a theme.

• Tap up to four tiles, then Submit to guess a group.
• Guess all four groups before your four mistakes run out.
• The four groups use different difficulty tiers: Yellow easiest, Green medium, Blue hard, Purple trickiest. The purple often involves wordplay.
• If you're one word away from a group, the game tells you so the guess still costs a mistake but you know to swap one word.
• Hard mode deals a second daily board built only from blue and purple tier groups, mixed from across the puzzle collection. No gentle categories, and both tiers can appear more than once.

What you see

A 4×4 grid of words. Every word belongs to exactly one of four hidden categories. The categories range from easy (yellow) through medium (green), hard (blue), to tricky (purple). The trickiest category usually involves wordplay — words that all precede a common word, all share a hidden letter, all anagram to a single target, etc.

Selecting and submitting

1. Tap a tile to select it (highlighted in the accent colour).
2. Tap up to three more, for a total of exactly four selected. Tap a selected tile to deselect it.
3. Tap Submit. The game either locks the group in (cells turn the group's colour and slide to the top) or marks the guess wrong.

The four mistakes rule

• You have four mistakes for the whole puzzle (one per wrong guess).
• If your selection contains three of the four words from one group, you'll see a "One away" message. The guess still costs a mistake, but you know to swap just one tile.
• Run out of mistakes and the puzzle ends; the remaining groups are revealed.

Strategy

• Start with what you're sure of. A confident yellow guess locks one row away and leaves a cleaner board.
• Watch for traps. Words that obviously fit a category often belong to the purple wordplay instead. If a yellow guess feels too neat, scan the other words for alternative connections.
• Save the purple for last. With only 4 words left, the wordplay is forced to be those four.
• Use Shuffle. Rearranging tiles can break visual rhymes that bias you toward a wrong grouping.

Worked example

Suppose the grid contains: RUBBER, RULER, BLUE, GREEN, RAPID, QUICK, RAKE, MOWER, BAND, LADY, TREACLE, CRUMBLE, SWIFT, SHARPENER, PENCIL, FRIDAY. The categories might be:

• Yellow: Garden tools — RAKE, MOWER (and 2 others).
• Green: Pencil case items — RULER, RUBBER, PENCIL, SHARPENER.
• Blue: Words meaning fast — RAPID, QUICK, SWIFT (and 1 other).
• Purple: Words before BIRD (LADY=LADYBIRD, BLACK=BLACKBIRD, etc.).

The trap: LADY could mean "noblewoman" so a yellow-feeling guess; but it actually belongs to the purple wordplay group.