A round
Four groups, ranked easiest to hardest
They are joined by whatever the puzzle wants them joined by: a plain category, a shared word that turns four of them into compounds, a smaller word hiding inside each.
The hardest group is nearly always the pile left over once the traps have been taken out of it.
The traps are the craft
Every board has at least one word that sits convincingly in a group it does not belong to, and the device is always the same: the group it looks like it belongs to is already full.
Four eye parts are PUPIL, IRIS, LENS and RETINA — so BROW, LASH and LID, which are obviously parts of an eye, must be somewhere else. Everything you need is on the board.
One away, and nothing else
Get exactly three of a group and the table is told so, and told nothing further. It is the only fact this game hands over and it is exact — three of one group, never two and two — because a generous version of it would be worse than none.
Four lit tiles are the room's proposal rather than yours, so somebody can talk you out of them before anybody presses. When somebody presses anyway and it is wrong, the board remembers who.
On the sheet
Questions people ask
Is there a daily puzzle?
Yes. Common Threads is one of three games in the rotation at /daily — one puzzle a day for everybody, a shape you can paste into a channel, and a streak that survives you closing the tab.
Do we each get our own lives?
No, and that is the design. One board, four lives, and anybody at the table may press — so the cost of a bad guess is the room's, which is exactly what turns it into ten minutes of talking rather than ten minutes of typing.
Does anybody have to install anything to play Common Threads?
No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.
Do we need accounts?
No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.
How many people can play Common Threads?
1 to 8 — best with four, and somebody who says the quiet one out loud. A room seats up to 12.
How long does a game of Common Threads take?
About 10 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.
Does it work over a video call?
That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.
Credit where it is due
Adapted from Connections, created by Wyna Liu for the New York Times in 2023. The puzzles here are our own.