Looplink

Looplink places twelve word tiles in a circle around a central counter that reads 0/4 GROUPS. You must find four groups of four, which doesn't add up at first: twelve tiles for sixteen slots, because four of them belong to two groups at once. The page explains it plainly: each group is made of two words it owns outright and two link tiles it shares with its neighbors, so the four categories do not form four separate piles but a closed chain: hence the ring on screen. Below the board, a row of four pips labeled MISTAKES, then three buttons: Shuffle, Deselect and Submit. The top bar lines up a timer with pause, a trophy, a calendar and a dark-theme toggle, and a right-hand column expands How to play, Scoring, FAQ and About Looplink.

1. Read the twelve tiles arranged in a circle and look for themes that could link them.
2. Click four tiles to form a group: the selected tiles darken.
3. Validate with Submit, which stays grayed out as long as the selection is incomplete.
4. Repeat until the central counter goes from 0/4 to 4/4, watching the MISTAKES row.
5. Keep in mind the two buttons flanking Submit, Shuffle and Deselect, which respectively reshuffle the ring and abandon the current selection.

The act of grouping words is familiar, but Looplink's constraint is much less so: here ambiguity is not a trap set for the player, it is the very structure of the board. Four words truly belong to two families, and by identifying these double-belongings you reconstruct the order of the circle, each group holding the next by the hand. It completely inverts the usual reflex: a quartet that seems too neat becomes suspicious, and certainty is the symptom, not the reward. The ring on screen, with its central counter and tiles darkening one by one, makes that geometry readable at a glance.

Immediate feedback is visual and discreet: three clicks darken three tiles on a cream background, with no message appearing, and the Submit button stays inactive while the fourth word is missing. The central counter stays at 0/4, and the four MISTAKES pips stay full. In other words, nothing happens on selection; everything happens when you validate.

Core play

A single default puzzle (the day’s board): twelve word tiles arranged in a circle with a central counter reading 0/4 GROUPS. The objective is to find four groups of four (each group = two owned words plus two shared link tiles). Interaction is selecting four tiles (they darken) and validating with Submit; controls shown are Shuffle (reshuffles the ring), Deselect (abandon current selection) and a MISTAKES row of four pips. The site UI also shows a timer/pause, trophy, calendar and dark-theme toggle, but no alternate game modes, difficulty settings, rounds or multiplayer variants.

• The page gives the board's arithmetic key: two words owned outright and two shared link tiles per group. A quartet where all four words fit perfectly the same theme, without ambiguity, is therefore a quartet read incorrectly.
• Sort first, validate later. Words that can only be read one way form the backbone of the groups; those that could fit two themes are the links, and it's this sorting that makes the ring fall into place.
• The links also give the order of the circle: a tile shared between two themes means those two groups are neighbors. If the deduced neighborhoods don't loop back, a thematic reading is wrong.
• When the circular layout fixes your gaze on misleading adjacencies, the Shuffle button, described as a reshuffle, is there to reshuffle positions without having to validate.