How to play Disconnections

One board a day: sixteen words hiding four groups of four. Find all four groups before you run out of guesses. The rules take a minute to learn and the boards take considerably longer to stop being smug about it.

Free, no account. Today's board is playable on the homepage.

The rules

• The board is sixteen words in a four-by-four grid. They belong to four hidden groups of four.
• Tap or click four words you think share a connection, then submit.
• Right, and the group locks in with its colour, its label appears, and those four words leave the grid.
• Wrong, and you lose one of your four guesses. If three of the four words were in the same group, the board tells you that you were one away.
• Solve all four groups and you've won. Spend all four mistakes and the board closes and shows you the answers.

Once three groups are out, the last four words are forced, so a board is either solved or lost with two groups still up. Nobody loses on the final group.

Four mistakes, and what they cost

You get four wrong guesses. The dots under the grid are how many you have left, and everyone else in the room can see them too. Mistakes don't just end runs, they cost points: a win is scored on how fast you finished, minus what your wrong guesses cost, so a clean solve outranks a scrambled one at the same time on the clock.

Hints

Stuck is a legitimate state. The hint button reveals the colour of one word in the easiest group still standing, which usually gives you a foothold rather than the answer. A hint costs the same as a mistake on your score, but it doesn't spend one of your four guesses, so it's the safe way to buy information. Once a single group is left the button goes quiet, since the last four words are already decided and there'd be nothing to reveal.

The four colours, easiest to hardest

The groups are ranked by how mean they are, and the colour tells you where each one sat once you solve it:

• Yellow is the straight one. A plain category, and the words mostly mean what they look like.
• Green asks for one small step: a shared property rather than a shared subject.
• Blue is where the wordplay starts, and where the words you already assigned to yellow turn out to be needed.
• Purple is the trick: hidden words, homophones, one letter changed, a pattern you only see backwards.

A good board is built so the easy group is the trap. Four words will sit together perfectly and one of them belongs somewhere else, which is why solving from the purple end is a real strategy and not showing off.

What the daily looks like in Discord

The whole server plays the same board. Beside your grid is a rail of everyone else in the room, each with a small copy of their own board that fills in live as they solve, plus their remaining mistakes and their finishing time. When the day is over the bot posts a recap in the channel with the results, the season standings, and whether the server's solve streak survived.

Playing it with friends

The rules are the same solo, but the daily was designed for a room. If what you're after is a word puzzle you can play with other people at the same time rather than comparing screenshots afterwards, the longer version of that is on playing Disconnections with friends: how the shared board works, what lands on the leaderboard, and how to launch it in a channel or a voice call in about ten seconds.