4 of a Kind is a daily puzzle about spotting connections. Sixteen items sit on the board and they hide four groups of four. Find all four groups before you run out of mistakes.
The idea
The difficulty isn't in knowing what the items are — they're everyday things. It's that the board is built so items look like they belong in more than one group at once. A board with hammer, plane, file and level on it is daring you to call them "tools", when the puzzle may want "things that are also verbs" or "words that appear in aviation". The items you're most confident about are usually the ones being used against you.
Each day's board is drawn from practical, real-world knowledge — hand tools, cooking, plants, trades, materials, weather. That's deliberate: solving one should leave you slightly better informed than you were, not just relieved.
How to play
- Look over all sixteen items before touching anything.
- Select four items you believe share a category.
- Submit your guess.
- If the group is right, it locks in and shows you the connection along with a short explanation of why those four belong together.
- If it's wrong, it costs you one of your four mistakes and the items stay on the board.
- Solve all four groups before your mistakes run out.
Mistakes and hints
You get four mistakes per board and two hints. A hint picks out tiles to help you — it's a real assist, not a consolation prize, and there's no shame in spending one on a board that's genuinely gone opaque.
Because a wrong guess doesn't remove anything from the board, a mistake costs you a life but teaches you something. If you were sure about four items and got it wrong, at least one of them belongs somewhere else — and that's often the piece of information you needed.
The four tiers
The groups on every board are ranked by difficulty and coloured by that rank, so once a group locks in, its colour tells you how hard it was meant to be:
- Yellow — easiest. The straightforward category, usually the one you spotted first. If you're confident about any group, this is the one to lead with.
- Green. Still a plain connection, but with at least one item that sits equally well elsewhere.
- Blue. Usually needs specific knowledge, or a connection that isn't about the objects themselves.
- Violet — hardest. Wordplay, a hidden pattern, or a category defined by something other than meaning. This is the group the whole board was arranged around.
Tactics that actually help
Solve by elimination, not by enthusiasm
The strongest move is often to find the group you're least tempted by. If four items have only one plausible home each, submit those — even if a flashier connection is shouting at you elsewhere. Locking one group in removes four items and makes everything left easier.
Count the candidates
If you can see five or six items that fit a category, you haven't found the category — you have found the trap. The board only ever gives you exactly four. When you're staring at six "kitchen things", the real question is which two are on loan to another group.
Look for the odd one out
Sometimes the fastest way in is to notice an item that fits nothing. An item with no obvious home is almost always in the violet group, and identifying one member of the hardest group tells you an enormous amount about the other three.
Say the words out loud
When a board resists a sensible reading, the connection is often about the words rather than the things: homophones, hidden shorter words, things that all precede or follow the same word. Reading the sixteen items aloud catches that far faster than staring does.
Hold your guess
There's no clock. Nothing rewards you for submitting quickly, and a mistake is permanent for that board. If you're at three of four certainty, it's nearly always worth another minute rather than another life.
Good to know
- A new puzzle appears every day, and everyone gets the same board.
- When you finish, you can share a spoiler-free grid of how you did — it shows the shape of your solve without giving away any answers.
- Solved groups come with a short explanation, so a board you lost still tells you what the connections were.
- You can play without an account. Signing in is only for keeping your results with you across devices.
- There's a haptics toggle if you'd rather play without the buzz on mobile.