How to Play Quartet
Quartet deals sixteen words onto a four-by-four grid of index cards. Hidden among them are four sets of four words, and every word belongs to exactly one set. Your job is to find the link that ties each set together, pick the four cards that share it, and press Submit. A correct set locks into a coloured band across the top of the drawer with its category name written on it. A wrong set costs one of your four misfiles.
Select cards by clicking or tapping them. A selected card turns dark ink on linen, and the Submit button wakes up only when exactly four cards are chosen. If your four cards contain three words from one set and a stranger, the game says "One away" and still charges a misfile. Submitting a stack you already tried does not charge anything, so you can never lose a life to a repeat.
The four bands run in colour order from oxblood through ochre and pine to slate, which is the order the puzzle author expected the sets to fall. The slate set is always wordplay: four words that hide a smaller word inside them, sound like something else, join the same word to make a new word or phrase, or turn into something else when they lose their first letter. When you are down to the last eight cards, look at the letters as well as the meanings. Wordplay can turn up at the other levels too, but slate always has it.
Red Herrings and the Art of Elimination
Every Quartet puzzle is built around at least one deliberate red herring: a word that looks as though it belongs to a second set. A drawer might seem to hold a set of instruments while a piano and a violin actually sit in two different sets for other reasons. The obvious grab of the instruments is wrong because each one is claimed elsewhere. You solve these by elimination. Find the set you are certain about first, remove those cards, and the overlaps start to fall apart. When you file a set that held a red herring, the game stamps that card RED HERRING before it slides into its band, and a small fish stays beside the word on the band, so you can see which overlap the drawer was built around.
When you are stuck, press Shuffle. It only reorders the cards that are still in play and never changes which words belong together, but a fresh arrangement often breaks the false pattern your eyes had settled on.
A Worked Example
Imagine a drawer that holds HERON, STORK, FLAMINGO, PELICAN and CRANE among its sixteen cards, alongside JACK, HOIST and WINCH. Five cards look like wading birds, and CRANE is the one that tempts you, because it is a bird and also a machine that lifts heavy loads. Before you spend a misfile, count the candidates for the other set. Lifting gear has only four plausible cards in the whole drawer: JACK, HOIST, WINCH and CRANE. A set needs exactly four, so CRANE must be lifting gear, and the birds are HERON, STORK, FLAMINGO and PELICAN. That counting step is the whole skill of the game. A red herring always fits two sets on the surface, but only one of those sets runs short without it.
Daily Puzzle, Archive and Scoring
The daily puzzle is chosen from the puzzle bank by counting the days since the first of October 2026 in UTC, so everyone in the world opens the same drawer on the same day. The bank is finite and cycles, so a puzzle comes back around after the bank has been used up. Press Archive Drawer after a game to open a drawer you have not filed yet, and press Today's Drawer to return to the daily. The archive never deals the coming week's dailies, so nobody can solve tomorrow's drawer in advance.
The end card files your result on a library date-due slip, stamped FILED or RETURNED with the day's date. Beside it, your stacks appear in the order you made them as columns of spine-coloured squares, so a clean solve reads as four solid columns and a tangle shows exactly where a herring caught you. Under the slip sit your daily streak, your best streak and the time left until the next drawer opens.
Your score for a solved daily puzzle is one hundred points for every misfile you still have, plus a speed bonus that shrinks as the clock runs. The clock starts on your first tap. A puzzle you fail scores nothing. Only the daily puzzle posts to the leaderboard, and archive puzzles are for practice.
Keyboard Shortcuts and Tips
- Enter submits the four selected cards, and Escape clears your selection.
- S shuffles the remaining cards.
- Tab or the arrow keys move focus between cards and Space toggles one, so the whole game works without a mouse.
- Look for the set with the least ambiguous link first. Filing it removes four candidates from every other theory.
- If a word seems to fit two sets, count how many other words fit each set. The set with exactly four candidates wins.
- Treat "One away" as information: three of your four cards are right, so swap exactly one.
- Read the words aloud. Homophone and hidden-word sets are easier to hear than to see.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a red herring in Quartet?
A red herring is a card that plausibly fits a second set. Every puzzle has at least one, for example an instrument that also belongs to a group of things with a bridge. Solve the clear sets first and the herrings resolve themselves.
How many misfiles do I get?
You start with four misfiles, shown as paper-clip pips at the top of the drawer. Each wrong set costs one. When the last is gone the game reveals the remaining sets. Repeating a stack you already tried is free.
What does "One away" mean?
It means three of the four cards you submitted belong to the same set. The guess still costs a misfile, but you know which set to keep chasing.
Does Shuffle change the answer?
No. Shuffle only reorders the cards still on the grid. Set membership never changes and it costs nothing.
How is the daily puzzle chosen?
The puzzle index is the number of UTC days since 1 October 2026, wrapped around the size of the puzzle bank, so every player sees the same drawer each day.
What do the four band colours mean?
Oxblood, ochre, pine and slate mark the intended difficulty of each set from easiest to hardest, and a locked set takes the colour of its rank. The slate set is always a piece of wordplay, such as words that hide a smaller word or words that all go in front of the same word.
How is my score worked out?
One hundred points per remaining misfile plus a speed bonus that counts down over five minutes from your first tap. Failed puzzles score zero, and only the daily puzzle posts to the leaderboard.
Can I share my result?
Yes. Copy Result puts a few short lines on your clipboard, one per stack you tried, with a letter for the spine colour of each card, so friends can see the order you filed the sets. It carries no scores or play counts.
What does the small fish on a band mean?
It marks a red herring: a card in that set that also looked as though it belonged to another set in the same drawer. When you file a set that contains one, the card is stamped RED HERRING before it slides into its band. After a loss the revealed bands carry the fish too, so you can see which overlap caught you.
