Fourfold guide

How to play Fourfold

Find four quartets among sixteen clues. In a Ranked match, the puzzle is your opponent.

Find a quartet

Select four clues that share one precise connection, then submit. A correct quartet locks into place. A wrong guess costs one mistake; “one away” means three of your selected clues belong together.

On an Interlocking board, selecting a fifth clue opens the planning organizer. You can arrange up to four labeled sets, then submit one active set of exactly four clues. Planning sets do not count as guesses.

Win condition

Solve every quartet with zero to three mistakes and you win. The fourth mistake—or giving up—settles a puzzle win immediately. You may continue solving afterward, but practice cannot change the result.

Choose a queue

Ranked pairs you with established puzzles near your rating. Eligible results move both your rating and the puzzle's rating. Discovery lets you help calibrate promising new puzzles without putting your own rating or ranked record at risk. A puzzle opened from Browse or a profile is a Casual game and does not affect rating.

Hints, topics, and structure

Revealing a creator-provided quartet hint before the result settles records the unassisted game as a loss. You can keep solving the same board for a separate result against its assisted rating. Revealing specialist topics or a spoiler-hidden structure label does not affect rating. Reveals after the result cannot change it.

Independent and Interlocking labels describe whether a strong quartet stands alone or may need confirmation from the rest of the board. Many kinds of deliberate overlap require the Interlocking label. Even then, careful look-ahead must make a no-mistake solution possible. You can choose in profile settings whether the structure label appears immediately or with other spoilers.

Guests and resuming

Guests can play, but their games do not affect ratings, feedback, tags, reports, or follows. Opening a puzzle does not commit it; your first guess or spoiler reveal does. Signed-in players can return to an unfinished committed puzzle from their history.