FOURPLAY

How Scoring Works

The math behind the "How everyone did today" chart on every puzzle breakdown.

The basics

• +1 to +4 Guessing a whole group correctly earns that group's own difficulty value — 1 for the easiest group, up to 4 for the hardest.
• −1 Any other 4-tile guess — mixing tiles from different groups — costs 1 point, correct group or not.

You get 4 wrong guesses before the puzzle ends in a loss. A perfect, no-mistake win earns every difficulty's value at once: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. A total loss with no groups solved at all is −4.

Why some scores never show up

Once you've correctly solved 3 of the 4 groups, only one group's 4 tiles are left on the board — and since every guess has to be exactly 4 tiles, there's no other combination left to pick. Your next guess is guaranteed correct. That means it's mathematically impossible to still be sitting at "3 solved" when a 4th wrong guess would end the game — reaching 3 correct always becomes 4 correct (a win) first.

That one fact rules out three scores entirely — 4, 5, and 6 can never happen, which is why the bar chart on each post's breakdown skips straight from 3 to 7 with a dotted line marking the gap.

Every score that's actually possible

−4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Red is a loss (0, 1, or 2 groups solved before the 4th wrong guess), green is a win (all 4 groups, with 0 to 3 wrong guesses along the way), and the three crossed-out scores in the middle are the mathematically impossible ones explained above.