Zol's Links Find the four hidden groups.

The rules

• You're shown a 4×4 grid of sixteen words.
• Four hidden groups of four share some connection — pick the four words you think belong together and submit them.
• A correct group locks in with its colour and its label; a wrong guess costs you a mistake.
• Clear all four groups before your mistakes run out. Land three of the four right and the game tells you you're "one away".
• The four colours rank the groups by slipperiness — yellow is the gentle one, purple is the trap.

How hard do you want it

Everyone gets the same board each day; the difficulty is how much mercy it shows:

• Easy — unlimited mistakes. You can't lose, only keep chipping away.
• Medium — four mistakes to spare.
• Hard — two mistakes, and hints only when you ask for them.
• Zolified — one mistake to spare, no "one away" mercy signal, and a forced hint every 30 seconds you can't switch off — each one costing more than the last.

The trap isn't the group you can't see. It's the word that fits two.

Three ways to play

The Daily gives everyone the same sixteen words. Free Play deals fresh boards, assembled on the fly from a deep library of groups, so it rarely repeats. And Versus sets you and a friend loose on the same puzzle — fewest mistakes wins. A clock ticks the whole time, so a clean, quick untangle scores best.

Play it

Play Zol's Links in your browser — nothing to download. Creating an account is free, and new players get a 30-day preview with full access to every game in the catalogue. After the preview, a rotating set of games is free to play each day.

More words to wrangle: Zol's Cipher, guess a hidden word from colour clues, Zol's Codebreaker, crack a phrase behind a scrambled alphabet, or Zol's Wordwedge, close in on a mystery word by guessing higher or lower through the dictionary.