A Strategy Guide to Link Lab

Link Lab gives you twelve tiles and asks you to sort them into three hidden sets of four. Each set has a theme, and the theme is not shown until you have found it. It is one of the games we write ourselves, and every board is hand-authored rather than generated, which affects how you should approach it.

The mechanics, precisely

Twelve tiles are laid out in a grid, shuffled into an order that carries no information. Tap a tile to select it and tap it again to deselect. Selection is capped at four — a fifth tap does nothing until you release one of the tiles you are holding.

With four selected, press Submit. If those four are exactly one of the hidden sets, they lock into a coloured band at the top of the board showing the set’s name, the short clue the author wrote for it, and its four members. If they are not, the selection clears and the strike counter in the sidebar goes up by one.

Two things follow from that description. First, nothing is committed until you press Submit, so arranging and rearranging tiles costs you nothing at all. Second, the strike counter is a record of how the solve went rather than a clock — it is there to be kept low, not to be survived.

Finding two sets solves the board. The remaining four tiles are the third set by elimination, so a run of good reads compounds hard.

Why the boards are hand-made

A generator can produce category puzzles all day, and they are almost always poor, because the interesting part of this format is the overlap and a generator does not know how to place one.

Every Link Lab board is written by a person and includes at least one tile that reads convincingly as a member of two different sets. That tile is the puzzle. The three themes themselves are usually easy — a set of things you do, a set of things you can hold, a set of words from a particular field. The work is deciding which of the five plausible members of an obvious theme actually belongs somewhere else.

Boards rotate daily from the authored set, and each carries its own title in the sidebar.

How to read the board

Count before you commit. If a theme has jumped out at you and you can see five tiles that fit it, you have not found a set — you have found a trap. Sets are exactly four. One of those five is the overlap, and it belongs to a theme you have not spotted yet. Finding which one is usually easier than staring at the remaining tiles, because the other two themes are constrained by what is left over.

Start from the orphan. The most useful tile on the board is often the one that seems to belong nowhere. It anchors the theme you are missing, and once you have named that theme the overlap resolves itself immediately.

Watch the grammar. Authored sets tend to be internally consistent in a way that is hard to hide. If three tiles are verbs and the fourth is a noun, the noun is probably in the wrong pile — even when it sits comfortably in the theme as a concept.

Read the specific sense, not the obvious one. Short words carry several meanings, and the set a tile belongs to often uses the meaning you did not reach for first. If a tile fits your theme only in its most common sense, treat it as suspect.

Which set to submit first

Submit the one you are most certain of, not the one you spotted first, and not the largest theme.

The reason is arithmetic. A correct submit removes four tiles from the grid, and eight tiles hiding two sets is a substantially easier problem than twelve hiding three — the overlap has fewer places to hide and the remaining themes are more exposed. Cashing in a certain set early converts confidence into information.

The corollary is that guessing early is expensive in a way that guessing late is not. A wrong submit on a full board teaches you almost nothing, because you cannot tell which of the four tiles was wrong. A wrong submit with eight tiles left is much more informative.

After you solve it

Read the set names and clues in the coloured bands. This is the habit that makes you better at the game, because the clues show you how the author frames a category, and those habits repeat across boards. Once you know that a theme tends to be defined by a shared action rather than a shared object, you start seeing the sets from a different angle.

If you liked this one

Mini Clue Grid is the other short word board we make, and Word Circuit is the deduction one. For sorting with a completely different shape, Water Sort and Ball Sort in the puzzle collection scratch a related itch with liquid instead of language.