Strategy · 6 min read
The Kindred Playbook: Red Herrings, Odd Ones Out, and Hint Economics
Sixteen words, four groups, four mistakes. The puzzle is built to mislead you, so count before you commit.
Count candidates before you touch anything
Kindred deals sixteen words and hides four groups of four among them, and the setter's whole craft is making five or six words look like they belong to the same group. So before you select a single word, name every idea you can see and count how many words fit it. If five words look like fruit, one of them is a red herring that belongs somewhere else. A group with exactly four candidates is safe; a group with five or more is a trap until you find its odd one out.
Work the safe group first. Locking four words in shrinks the board to twelve and removes one red herring from every crowded category at the same time. The puzzle gets easier with every group you solve, so solve the certain one to earn the uncertain ones.
Read every word two ways
LIME is a fruit and a color. HUSKY is a dog and a voice. BASS is a fish and a note. The hardest group — four pips — is nearly always hiding in plain sight as ordinary words with a second reading: words that precede or follow a common word (MOUNTAIN ___, ___ BALL), homophones, anagrams, words that contain a hidden shorter word, things that come in a set. When a word seems to fit nowhere, that is the tell that its meaning is not the one you are reading.
The pips are information after the fact. A group locks with one to four pips showing how hard it was — one pip is a plain category, four is wordplay — so if your first two groups came up with one and two pips, the remaining eight words hold the three- and four-pip groups, and you should be looking for the sly link, not the obvious one.
Make "One away…" work for you
When three of your four belong together, the game tells you "One away…", and that is a real clue: keep three, swap one. Do not start over. If you have four candidates for the fourth slot, you can find the right one in at most four swaps — but you will usually find it in one or two, because "One away" also tells you which of your other ideas has been stealing a word from this group.
A set you have already tried is free to try again. This matters in the endgame: if you are down to eight words and unsure which two-and-two split is right, resubmitting an earlier set costs nothing, so you are never punished twice for the same idea. Be systematic about which swaps you have tried rather than cycling at random.
A hint is always cheaper than a guess
The scoring counts the sets you submitted — four is perfect, seven is the worst possible win — out of a budget of seven, with every unused submission worth 250 points: a flawless solve banks 750, one mistake 500, two 250, three nothing. Speed is worth at most 240 points across a ten-minute cap, so a single wrong set costs more than the whole speed bonus. Every guess you cannot justify is a 250-point bet.
Against that, the hints are cheap. "Name a category" reveals the label of the easiest group you have not found for 100 points — you still have to find its four words, but you now know which idea is real. "Show a pair" rings two words that belong together for 200. Neither costs a mistake, both can be used more than once, and both are cheaper than a wrong submission. When you are down to your last mistake and torn between two sets, name a category: it costs 100, tells you which of your two ideas is a real group, and saves the puzzle.
Hardest first, or last — decide on purpose
Once three groups are locked, the fourth is whatever remains, so the wordplay group very often solves itself — you never have to see the link, only to eliminate the other three. That is the default plan: obvious group, then the next-safest, and let the four-pip group fall out at the end for free.
The alternative is deliberate. If you can see the wordplay group early — the hidden-word or the fill-in pattern jumps out — submitting it first earns the Hardest First achievement and removes the hardest red herrings from the board in one move. The mistake is doing it on a hunch: a four-pip group submitted with three candidates and a guess is exactly the 250-point bet the whole puzzle is designed to tempt you into.
Shuffle, and read the holiday
Shuffle rearranges the unsolved words and it is free. Position creates false patterns — three words in a row look like a group because they are in a row — and a shuffle breaks the pattern your eye has fixed on. Use it whenever you have stared at the same twelve words for more than thirty seconds.
On a holiday the puzzle belongs to the day, which narrows the categories before you read a word. Kindred hints and mistakes never touch your Daily Sweep — like every More Games title it is extra XP, medals and a leaderboard — so a rough day here is a rough day here and nothing more.
Put it into practice — Wordocious gives everyone the same daily puzzle in every mode, so you can test these ideas and compare your result on the global leaderboard.