Common ThreadArchive
Pick an earlier day and play it. No streak, just practice.
Sixteen words on the board, and they split into four groups of four. Your job is to find what ties each group together: a category, a word they can all follow, a pattern hiding in the spelling.
Several words look like they belong in more than one group, on purpose. The obvious pairing is often the trap, and the last group usually only makes sense once the other three are out of the way.
Everyone gets the same puzzle on the same day, and a new one arrives at midnight your time. The English and Indonesian puzzles are written separately, so playing both means two different puzzles.
How it works
- Tap four words you think belong together, then press Submit.
- A right guess locks the group in and shows what connects it. A wrong one costs one of your four mistakes.
- "One away" means three of the four you picked belong together.
- Groups are colour-coded by difficulty: yellow is the most direct, purple the most devious.
Common questions
- When does the puzzle change?
- At midnight on your own device’s clock. Everyone plays the same puzzle on the same date, but someone in another time zone may get tomorrow’s a few hours before or after you.
- What does "One away" mean?
- Three of the four words you picked belong to the same group, and one doesn’t. It still costs a mistake, but it tells you which three to keep and that the fourth is somewhere else on the board.
- Can a word fit more than one group?
- It can look like it does, and that’s the point. Every word belongs to exactly one group in the answer. When a word seems to fit two, work out the groups around it first; the one with no other candidates usually decides where it goes.
- What is the archive?
- Every earlier puzzle, one tap away. Days you have finished on this device are marked, so it is easy to catch up on the ones you missed. Archive puzzles do not count towards your streak.
- Where is my streak kept?
- In this browser only. There are no accounts, so clearing your site data or switching devices starts the streak again from zero.
Common Thread is a word puzzle, not a measure of anything. Some groups lean on general knowledge or English wordplay, so a missed group usually means an unfamiliar reference rather than slow thinking. Your streak and progress are kept in this browser only and won’t follow you to another device.
Okay, now pick another
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