How many Word Groups boards are there?

Forty-four, every one written by hand — 176 categories and 704 word slots between them. New board deals one of the 44 at random rather than working through them in order, so on average the ninth board you deal is one you have seen before; the number under the grid says which.

Do hints cost a mistake?

No. The first hint names one category without saying which words are in it; after that a hint names two words that share a group, which is still two short of handing you the answer.

Why did my correct-looking group fail?

Almost always because one word belongs more strongly to a group you have not seen yet. That is the design: every board carries at least one word written to read as a member of two different groups.

Can I play Word Groups on a phone without a connection?

Yes. The boards ship with the page and nothing is fetched while you play, so it works on a plane, on the underground and in the app exactly as it does in a browser.

How to Play Word Groups

Sort sixteen words into four hidden groups of four. Select four words and submit them; a correct group leaves the grid with its category revealed. Four wrong guesses ends the board. Three correct out of four is reported as one away. At least one word on every board plausibly belongs to two groups, and finding which one is the whole game.

The rules, step by step

1Read all sixteen words firstThe board is four rows of four, but the rows mean nothing — the sixteen words are shuffled into the grid and any four of them may be a group.
2Select exactly fourTap or click four words, or move with the arrow keys and press Space. Tapping a selected word takes it back out; Deselect clears all four at once.
3Submit the groupPress Submit, or Shift + Enter. If the four are a group, they leave the grid and appear as a solved bar with their category written on it.
4Watch the mistake dotsA wrong guess costs one of four mistakes. Three of the four right is reported as “one away” and still costs a mistake; a guess you have already submitted costs nothing.
5Find three groups and the fourth is freeOnce three groups are solved, the four remaining words can only be the last group, so the board completes them for you rather than asking for a formality.
6Four mistakes ends the boardThe groups you had not found are revealed one at a time, easiest first, so the board finishes by showing you the answer rather than hiding it.

Try it — the rules above, running

Time0:00Groups0/4Mistakes0/4Puzzle#31

Hint names a category the first time and two words that share a group after that — it never costs a mistake, and never hands over a whole group. Shuffle rearranges the words still in play, which is worth doing whenever a row starts looking like a group, and the three-dot menu holds today’s shared board, Deselect and the keyboard shortcuts.

Your statistics

Played: 0
Won: 0
Win rate: 0%
Streak: 0
Best streak: 0
Best time: —
Mistakes left: 4

This board

Puzzle #31 of 44, written by hand. Its four groups are ranked easiest to hardest, and a lost board hands them back in that order. Every one of the sixteen words is in the shipped ENABLE dictionary, so the difficulty is which group a word is in, never whether you have met the word before.

Keyboard

Arrows: Move around the grid
Space: Pick the word up, or put it back
Shift + Enter: Submit the four you have picked
Shift + D: Deselect everything
Shift + S: Shuffle the grid
Shift + H: Hint — a category, then a pair
Shift + F: Full screen
?: This list

How do you start a Word Groups board?

1Read all sixteen before touching anythingNot row by row — the grid order is a shuffle and carries no meaning. You are looking for words with an obvious second sense, because those are the ones the board is built on.
2Name the categories you can see, out loud if it helpsFour birds. Four ways of saying quiet. Four things that go in front of BOARD. Naming is what turns a wall of words into a small number of competing hypotheses.
3Count the candidates for each categoryA category with exactly four candidates is a group. A category with five or six is a trap you have not resolved yet, and guessing into it is how boards are lost.
4Submit the group with no spare candidates firstEvery group you take off the board makes the rest easier: with twelve words left a blind guess is right one time in 165 rather than one in 455, and your own guesses improve much faster than that.

What do the four mistakes really buy you?

They buy you experiments. A guess that fails is not wasted if it was chosen to tell you something — submitting four words you are 80% sure of, and being told one away, converts a guess into a fact about twelve words. A guess made because a row looked tidy tells you nothing at all and costs exactly the same.

A repeat costs nothing. The same four words submitted twice are refused, not charged.
One away still costs a mistake, but your four words stay selected so you can change one.
The last group is free. Three solved groups complete the fourth automatically.
A hint costs no mistake — the first names a category, the next names two words that share one.

What kinds of category should you look for?

Members of a set — four ducks, four trees, four chess pieces. The easiest to see and the easiest to over-fill.
Synonyms — four ways to say the same thing, where one of them is also a noun with a life of its own.
Before or after a shared word — KEY, CARD, SURF and SPRING all take BOARD. Twenty-one of the 176 groups work this way.
Homophones — DOE, RAY, FAR and TEA are musical notes if you say them rather than read them.
Anagram families — SILENT, TINSEL, ENLIST and INLETS are the same six letters four times.
Letter wordplay — a smaller word hiding inside a larger one, or a word that is another word backwards.

How is this scored and saved?

A board is won when all four groups are found and lost on the fourth mistake; both go into your win rate and streak, which live in your own browser and go nowhere else. A board in progress saves itself, so closing the tab mid-solve does not cost you the board. There is no account, no server and nothing to sign up for — the same as every other game here, including cryptogram and word hunt.

How do you win more often?

Start with the group you are certain of, not the one you spotted firstSpotting is cheap and certainty is not. A board is designed so that the first pattern your eye finds contains a trap — there are 127 traps across the 44 boards and every board has at least one, so the four words that leapt out are exactly the four most likely to contain the intruder.
Count how many words could fit each category before guessingIf you can see five plausible members of a category, you do not have a group, you have a category with a trap in it. Find which of the five is claimed more strongly by a different group and remove it — that is the deduction the board was built around, and it costs nothing to make.
Solve the hardest group by elimination, not by recognising itOne group on every board is ranked hardest, and it is usually the one with no obvious theme at all. You are not meant to see it: you are meant to be left holding it. Clearing the three you can name leaves four words that must be a group, whether or not you can say why.
Treat “one away” as twelve candidates, not a near missOne away means three of your four share a group, so exactly one of your picks is the intruder and any of the twelve other words on the board could replace it. Change one word per attempt. Changing two throws away the only fact the board just gave you.
Shuffle before you commit, and read the board down the columnsGrid position carries no information, but the eye groups by adjacency anyway, and four unrelated words on one row will read as a set for as long as you let them. Shuffling is free and never costs a mistake, so reshuffle whenever a row starts to look convincing. Reading the board down the columns instead of across does the same job without a tap: it breaks the rows your eye has already committed to.

Common questions about word groups

How many Word Groups boards are there?: Forty-four, every one written by hand — 176 categories and 704 word slots between them. New board deals one of the 44 at random rather than working through them in order, so on average the ninth board you deal is one you have seen before; the number under the grid says which.
Do hints cost a mistake?: No. The first hint names one category without saying which words are in it; after that a hint names two words that share a group, which is still two short of handing you the answer.
Why did my correct-looking group fail?: Almost always because one word belongs more strongly to a group you have not seen yet. That is the design: every board carries at least one word written to read as a member of two different groups.
Can I play Word Groups on a phone without a connection?: Yes. The boards ship with the page and nothing is fetched while you play, so it works on a plane, on the underground and in the app exactly as it does in a browser.

Ready to stop reading? Play word groups on the full board, with controls and statistics tailored to that game.