BANDGRID
Sixteen tiles. Four hidden categories of four. Artists, albums, and songs all mixed together — and the categories are sneakier than they look.
Find the connections.
Sixteen tiles
The board is artists, albums, songs, sometimes producers — all jumbled. Four hidden categories of four.
Pick four
Tap four tiles you think share a theme. Submit. Wrong picks burn a mistake; right ones lock the group in.
Don't burn out
Four mistakes and the round ends. Clean sweeps streak harder. Themes get sneakier on weekends.
How Bandgrid works.
Bandgrid is a daily 4×4 connections puzzle, scoped to music. Sixteen tiles hide four secret categories of four. Group them all without burning four mistakes. It is in the same family as the New York Times' Connections, but every grid is music.
The rules
- One 4×4 grid per day. 16 tiles total.
- Four hidden categories, each with exactly four tiles.
- Tap four tiles to highlight them, then submit.
- Correct guess: the four lock in and the category is revealed.
- Wrong guess: you spend one of four mistakes.
- Solve all four categories without exhausting your mistakes.
How points work
Solving with zero mistakes scores the maximum. Each mistake knocks the score down. Failing to solve before exhausting mistakes scores partial credit for any categories already locked. Difficulty across the four groups is colour-coded after-the-fact (yellow → easy, purple → trickiest), but you do not see the colours until each group is solved.
A worked grid
Tiles include "Madonna", "1989", "Lemonade", "Taylor Swift", "Beyoncé", "Reputation", "Rihanna", "Anti", "Confessions on a Dance Floor", "Erotica", "Loud", "Born This Way", "Lady Gaga", "ARTPOP", "True Blue", "Like a Virgin". Possible categories: artists (Madonna, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lady Gaga — but that's five, so the trick is which one belongs to a different group), Madonna albums, Taylor Swift albums, Lady Gaga albums, Beyoncé/Rihanna albums. The puzzle's job is to make you over-commit to the obvious group.
Where the categories come from
Categories are hand-written. Difficulty is balanced so that one group is gettable on first sight, two are mid-difficulty, and one is the trap (e.g., albums that share a one-word title across artists). Suggestions welcome at support@criticscale.com.