How to play Single, the word game where one word belongs to every group

Single is a daily word game built on a 3x3 grid of nine words. They make four groups of three, and one of them, the Single, sits in all four. You play by tapping three words and submitting them. Solve all four groups and the Single ends up wearing every colour.

Single is inspired by Connections, and our Categories game is closer still. What Single adds is overlap: every group shares a word with every other, and finding it is most of the game.

It's live now in CleverGoat Labs.

How Single works

Get a trio right and the three tiles take that group's colour.

• Twelve slots across four groups, and the Single fills four of them, which is how twelve slots hold nine words.
• Four lives. A fourth wrong guess ends the game, and repeating a trio costs nothing.
• Nothing greys out. Even solved tiles stay tappable, because locking them would narrow the board for you.
• You never have to name the Single. Find the groups and it names itself.

Single won't tell you when you're one away. The reason is sharper than it looks. A wrong trio containing the Single is always one word short of two groups. A trio without it is one short of one group at most, often of none. So the silence is what leaks: a wrong guess with no message proves the Single is not among your three.

A worked example

Here is the first Single we published. The nine words: BEAR, GLOVE, WINK, BALL, BEE, MONKEY, HELICOPTER, BAT, and FLUTTER.

• Baseball stuff: BAT, BALL, GLOVE
• Do with eyes: BAT, FLUTTER, WINK
• Things that fly: BAT, HELICOPTER, BEE
• Mammals: BAT, BEAR, MONKEY

BAT is the Single, and it earns the job on three unrelated senses, one doing double duty: a baseball bat, batting an eyelid, and the animal, which is both a flyer and a mammal. Every other word on that board belongs to exactly one group.

How to find the Single faster

The first two groups are the hard part. Once the Single carries two colours it is out in the open and the rest is pairing up what's left.

So look for the word doing the most work. Ask of each tile how many groups it could plausibly join. Three is your candidate.

Two buttons help. Shuffle rearranges the tiles still in play, never a solved group. A hint marks one word from each unsolved group, never the Single, so an unmarked tile stays a candidate. Spend a second hint and every word but the Single is marked, which is the escape hatch: you can buy the deduction rather than be handed it.

Why Single is in Labs

I keep coming back to how much tension nine words can hold. Eight of them have one job each. The ninth is doing four, unmarked, until you land a second group and it stops hiding, at which point the difficulty falls off a cliff. Hard start, quick finish. I like that shape in a daily puzzle.

Labs is where we find out whether it holds up for anyone but me. What I want to hear: whether the categories feel fair, whether four lives is right, and whether the hint helps or spoils it.

Where to play it

Single is live in CleverGoat Labs, with a new board every day at midnight New York time.

The archive is open as well, so play everything you have missed. The New York Times keeps most of its Connections back catalogue for Games subscribers, whereas ours is free to anyone.

If you would rather your groups didn't overlap, Categories is on the main site.