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Best
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A fast visual-reasoning puzzle in the style of the matrix tests used in IQ assessments. Each 3×3 grid of shapes hides a few rules about shape, number, colour and fill; work them out and pick the tile that completes the empty corner. You have 90 seconds, wrong answers cost time, and the puzzles get harder as you go.
The top of the screen shows a 3×3 grid of tiles with the bottom-right tile missing. Every tile has four features: the shape (circle, square, triangle, diamond, hexagon or star), how many copies of it there are (one to four), its colour (white, yellow or blue) and its fill (solid, outline only, or striped).
Each feature follows one rule across the rows of the grid. It may be the same in every tile; it may stay the same along each row but change from one row to the next; it may cycle through three different values so that each row contains each value once; or the number of shapes may go up or down by one from left to right. Different features can follow different rules in the same puzzle.
Below the grid are six candidate tiles. Tap the one that completes the grid so that every feature still follows its rule. A correct answer scores a point and the next puzzle appears at once. A wrong answer costs three seconds, and the correct tile is shown before the next puzzle.
You have 90 seconds in total, shown by the bar and the countdown above the grid. The first puzzles change only one feature; every three correct answers the level rises and more features start to change. Your score is the number of puzzles you solve before the time runs out.
Take the features one at a time. It is almost impossible to see the whole answer at once, but it is easy to ask a single question: what shape goes in the corner? Then how many? Then which colour? Then which fill? Each answer rules out options, and after two or three questions only one tile is left.
For each feature, look at the first two rows before the last one. If a feature is identical along every row, the missing tile simply copies the rest of its row. If each row contains the same three values in a different order, the missing value is the one that the bottom row and the right-hand column do not have yet.
Counting is the rule people miss. When the number of shapes changes along a row, check whether it goes up or down by one; the corner then continues the sequence of the bottom row. Rows can start from different numbers, so compare the steps, not the totals.
A wrong answer costs three seconds, about as long as a careful look at one feature, so guessing rarely pays. At the higher levels all four features change, and a steady feature-by-feature routine is both faster and more accurate than trying to spot the pattern at a glance.