Claim the Group

How to play

Everyone in the room sees the same board of word tiles. Hidden among them are groups of four words that belong together: four cheeses, four planets, four words that go in front of “fish”. Nobody tells you what the groups are. You have to spot them.

Pick four tiles and hit “Claim!”. If they really are a group, it’s yours. You score, the link between the words appears, and the four tiles vanish from everyone’s board. Then the race goes on with whatever is left. Every group has a difficulty level from 1 to 5, shown by its colour, and the trickier ones are worth more.

The board is built to trip you up. Some words look as if they fit two groups, and quite often five tiles seem to fit a group that only has room for four. But there’s only ever one way to split the board, so when a word could go in two places, the rest of the board tells you where it really belongs.

A round ends when the clock runs out or when only one group is left. That last group opens by itself and scores for nobody. The reveal then shows the whole board: who claimed which group, and the ones nobody found. After 3 or 5 rounds, the highest total wins.

Board sizes

• 8 tiles: 2 groups, 75 seconds a round.
• 16 tiles: 4 groups, 2.5 minutes a round. This is the standard board.
• 20 tiles: 5 groups, 3 minutes a round.

The host picks the board and the number of rounds, 3 or 5, before the game starts. Whatever the size, a group is always four words.

Scoring

• Claiming a group: 300 points times its level. From easiest to trickiest the multiplier is ×1, ×1.25, ×1.5, ×1.75 and ×2, so a group is worth 300, 375, 450, 525 or 600.
• A wrong claim: −50, and you’re locked out for 3 seconds while everyone else keeps going.
• “One away!”: if three of your four tiles belong to the same group, the game tells you so. Only you see it.

Sending the exact same wrong four again costs nothing; the game just reminds you that you’ve tried it.

An example round

Four friends, the 16-tile board. On the screen: Brie, Mercury, Sword, Venus, Edam, Iron, Star, Mars, Feta, Copper, Cat, Neptune, Stilton, Zinc, Gold, Saturn.

Ben spots the cheeses in seconds and claims Brie, Edam, Feta and Stilton. An easy group, level 1, so +300.

Callum goes for metals: Iron, Copper, Zinc and Gold. Wrong. His screen says “One away!”, he loses 50 and he’s locked for 3 seconds. Meanwhile Aisha has been staring at Sword, Star and Cat, wondering what they could possibly share, until it clicks: they all go in front of “fish”. So does Gold. She claims Sword, Star, Cat and Gold, a level 5 group, and takes +600.

Callum’s lock runs out. Three of his metals were right and Gold is gone, so the fourth has to be Mercury. Iron, Copper, Zinc, Mercury: level 3, +450.

That leaves Venus, Mars, Neptune and Saturn, the last group, which opens by itself. Olivia had been looking at five planets the whole round, unable to decide which one to leave out. Mercury was the trap, and it was a metal all along.

After one round: Aisha 600, Callum 400, Ben 300, Olivia nothing yet. Two rounds to go.

Playing alone

Start a room on your own and Claim the Group turns into a solo puzzle. There’s no race and no lock. Instead you get 4 mistakes per board, and every wrong claim uses one up. When you get down to the last group, it’s yours, because by then there’s only one way left to split the board.

The board ends when you’ve found every group, when your mistakes run out or when time is up. You keep the points for every group you found, and a cleared board earns a bonus on top: +100 for each mistake you didn’t use and +3 for every second left on the clock. It makes a good quick puzzle on the bus, or while friends are still joining.

Tips

Count before you claim. If five tiles seem to fit one group, one of them belongs somewhere else. Look for the group that can’t be finished without it.

Take the sure thing first. Every group that leaves the board makes the rest easier to see, for you and for everyone else. Being right quickly beats being clever slowly.

Look at the words, not just their meaning. Some groups are about the words themselves: a word hidden inside another, the same first syllable, words that all go before or after the same word.

Make the most of “One away!”. It’s information only you have. Swap one tile, not all four, and you’ll often get it on the next try.

Don’t spray guesses. Three seconds is a long time in a race, and 50 points a go adds up. A wrong claim costs you more than a few seconds of thinking.

Free rooms and Guezzer Pass

Free rooms play the 16-tile board, with 3 or 5 rounds. With Guezzer Pass, the host also opens the quick 8-tile board and the bigger 20-tile one.

When it works best

Claim the Group takes 1 to 8 players. A 3-round game on the standard board takes about ten minutes, often less, because a round ends as soon as only one group is left. Crossword people will feel at home, but quick eyes count as much as a big vocabulary. With two or three players there’s time to think; with seven or eight, the easy groups are gone in seconds. Everyone picks on their own phone, so it plays just as well on a video call as round a table.

Questions people ask

How is it different from other word-grouping puzzles?

If you like puzzles where you sort words into groups of four, you already know the idea. The difference is that here everyone works on the same board at the same time, and the group you’re piecing together can be snapped up by someone else.

What if two of us claim at the same moment?

The claim that arrives first wins the group. The other player sees “Too slow, it’s gone!” and loses nothing.

What are the puzzles about?

All sorts: food, films by genre, singers, sport, science, culture, words borrowed from other languages, and plenty of wordplay, such as hidden words or words that start the same way. Each language has its own puzzles, written for the people who speak it, so the wordplay actually works.