THE AUDIT

Sixteen line items from the sort of spreadsheet nobody wants to be handed. Four of them belong together, and so do the other twelve, in three more groups of four. Find all four groups before you lose four lives. Same board for everybody, resetting at midnight UTC.

One group is a gift and one is a trap

Every board carries exactly one group at each of four difficulty tiers. The easiest is meant to be spotted immediately. The hardest is built out of items that look like they obviously belong to one of the other three, and it is the reason people lose.

So the tier you can see straight away is not a win, it is the setup. If the first group you spot is the giveaway, the four items you have removed were the ones making the hard group look easy.

The mistake almost everybody makes

You find five or six items that plausibly share a theme, pick the four you like best, and submit. That is a coin flip dressed as deduction, and it costs a quarter of your lives.

The board is built so that at least one item in every obvious-looking cluster belongs somewhere else. When you can see six candidates for a group of four, the useful question is not which four are best. It is which two are being borrowed by a group you have not identified yet.

Tactics

• Solve the hardest group first if you can see it. Nothing else on the board is capable of misleading you afterwards. It is the opposite of the instinct and it is the strongest play available.
• Count the overlaps. An item that fits two themes is doing a job. Work out which of the two themes has three members that fit nothing else, and the overlap belongs to the other one.
• Read the wording, not just the meaning. Groups are sometimes joined by the shape of the phrase rather than the subject, so items that feel unrelated can share a form.
• Say the category out loud before submitting. If you cannot name what the four have in common in a short phrase, you have found a coincidence rather than a group.

Where the puzzles come from

All 45 boards are written by hand, which is 180 groups and 720 line items. Generated groups do not work for this: the whole game depends on a human deciding which item to make ambiguous and which group to hide behind another, and that judgement is the puzzle.

The grouping stays on the server. Your browser receives sixteen shuffled strings and posts four at a time to be checked, so the answer is not in the page.