At midnight in your own time zone. The game takes the date from your device, so a new board turns up as soon as your calendar day changes, without reloading the page. Everyone on the same date gets the same board for each language and level, and Easy, Medium and Hard each have a daily board of their own.
Extra boards for when one a day is not enough, at any level and with no limit. Practice boards are numbered, and you start from a random number, so you and your friends get different ones. Press “New board” to move on, or “Next practice board” when you finish one. Practice games do not count towards your statistics or streak.
Easy uses everyday groups such as fruits or colours, with no traps. Medium adds a fill-in-the-blank group like ___BALL and may hide one group that looks right but is not. Hard brings in wordplay: hidden words, words that read backwards, words that sound like letters. It also sets several red herrings, cards that seem to fit two groups at once, so the obvious four is often wrong.
6 on Easy and 4 on Medium and Hard. Each wrong guess turns over one of the card backs under the board. If three of your four cards belong together, the game tells you that you are one away. Trying the same four cards twice does not cost a mistake. If you run out, the game shows you the groups you missed.
Press Hint once to see the name of the easiest group you have not found yet. Press it again and one card from that group gets a mark. Hints never cost a mistake. Once you solve that group you can ask for another, and your result shows how many hints you used.
Yes, in your browser’s local storage on this device: the board you are playing, your settings, and your statistics for daily boards, kept separately for each language and level. Your streak counts the daily boards you win on consecutive days. The game does not upload any of this, so it does not follow you to another device or browser, and clearing your browser data or playing in a private window starts you from zero.
It is free, and there is nothing to sign up for: open the page and play, on a phone or a computer. The page may show ads, which help keep the game free.
Boards are built by code from a bank of word groups, and a solver checks that every board has exactly one answer. The English bank holds 92 groups today. New groups are reviewed before they go in and only start appearing from a later date, so today’s board never changes under you. If a group looks wrong, email hello@chabulab.com with the board number, language and level.