How to play Pokennection

The daily puzzle

The board shows 16 Pokémon. Four of them share a hidden category, another four share a different one, and so on — four groups in total. Select four Pokémon and press Send. If they belong together, the group is revealed with its name.

You start with 4 lives. Every wrong guess costs one, and losing all four ends the puzzle. Solve all four groups to win.

A group can be almost anything: a shared type, an evolution line, a region, a colour, an egg group, a generation — or something much sneakier. That ambiguity is the whole game. A Pokémon that looks like an obvious Fire type may be there for a completely different reason.

A new puzzle is released every day. You can also play past puzzles from the menu in the top-left corner.

Images or Names

The same puzzle can be played two ways. Images shows the sprites, which makes visual groups (colour, shape, silhouette) easier to spot. Names shows only the names, which hides the visual clues and pushes you towards what you actually know about each Pokémon. Your streak is tracked separately for each view, so they are effectively two challenges.

Difficulty: Normal, Hard, Hard+ and Any

Difficulty does not change the number of lives — it changes which groups can appear. Each level draws from a different pool, so harder settings drop the gentle categories entirely:

• Normal — easy and normal groups. No hints.
• Hard — normal and hard groups. You start with 1 hint.
• Hard+ — hard and hard-plus groups only. You start with 2 hints.
• Any — groups from all four levels mixed together, from the gentlest to the most obscure. You start with 1 hint.

A hint reveals help on a group you have not solved yet. Harder settings hand you more of them precisely because the categories get much more obscure — Hard+ leans on deep trivia rather than anything you can read off the sprite. Every difficulty — Any included — is its own puzzle for the day, with its own streak and leaderboard, and the same choice is there in No overlap, the other board sizes and Unlimited.

No overlap

In the standard puzzle a Pokémon can plausibly fit more than one group, and part of the difficulty is working out where it actually belongs. That is intentional, but it also means a reasonable guess can be wrong for a reason you could not have known.

No overlap removes that. The puzzle is built so every Pokémon on the board belongs to exactly one of the four groups — each group is guaranteed to have four Pokémon that appear in none of the others. If you can justify a group, it is the right group. It is a cleaner, more deductive puzzle, and it has its own leaderboard.

5x5

The 5x5 board is a bigger version of the same daily puzzle: five groups of five, twenty-five Pokémon at once. You get five lives instead of four, because there is one more group to find and far more ways to go wrong.

It sits in the same selector as Classic, No overlap and Group Hunter, so you pick one of them — 5x5 is a board of its own, not a layer on top of No overlap. What it does combine with is the view and the difficulty: images or letters, Normal, Hard or Hard+. Each combination is its own puzzle for the day with its own board and its own progress, so playing the 4x4 does not spoil or complete the 5x5.

The extra tiles change how it plays: with twenty-five candidates, a category that felt obvious on a 4x4 board now has more lookalikes to sift through, and the fifth group is usually the one holding the leftovers together.

Group Hunter

Group Hunter is a different game built on a fixed board of Pokémon. Instead of finding four groups and stopping, your goal is to find every group hidden among them — and here a single Pokémon can belong to several groups at once.

The board comes in three sizes — 3x3, 4x4 and 5x5 — and you submit as many Pokémon as the board is wide. By default every group in the game counts (Any); Normal, Hard and Hard+ narrow it down to that difficulty's groups, like the daily.

There are no lives. Wrong guesses only add to your fail count, so you can keep hunting until you have found them all or you give up and reveal the rest. Pick Pokémon that share something — type, colour, generation, egg group — and submit.

How a submission resolves

Because a Pokémon can belong to many groups, your four will often match more than one group at once — and when that happens you claim all of them in a single submit. Four Pokémon that are all Water, all Blue and all first generation hand you those three groups together, and the message names every group you just took, so the "left to find" counter never drops without telling you why.

The groups you claim are listed from the most specific to the most general, and "specific" means members present on this board, not how big the category is in the game. A group with hundreds of Pokémon can be the tightest one here if only four of them made it onto the board.

Cascade

Cascade is Group Hunter with a board that refills. Pick Pokémon that share something and submit: they leave the board and new ones drop in from the day's deck, in the same squares, so the rest of the board stays where you left it. You pick as many as the board is wide: three on 3x3, four on 4x4 and five on 5x5. A submission resolves exactly as it does in Group Hunter — four Pokémon that are all Water, all Blue and all first generation claim those three groups at once.

A group you claim then rests for three turns before it can be claimed again. Without that you could take the same easy group every single turn, since the board keeps handing you new Pokémon — and it does come back, which matters at the end. A counter under the board tells you how many groups are claimable right now and how many are resting.

The deck, and how a run ends

The day's deck holds 48 Pokémon and the counter shows what is left of it. Once it runs dry nothing replaces the four you take, so the board shrinks with every group — the last stretch is played with eight or ten Pokémon and it is where the run is won or lost. It ends when no group is left to claim. There are no lives: wrong guesses only add to your fail count.

Your score is how many groups you claimed, and it earns stars. How many each star takes depends on the board size and the difficulty — on a 4x4 board with Any, it is 6 groups for one, 13 for two and 16 for three — and the counter under the board tells you how far the next one is. The board always has at least one group on it — the game guarantees that — but if you cannot find it, giving up closes the run with the stars you have, not with none.

Difficulty

The difficulty decides which groups count. By default it is Any, which accepts every group in the game, the same as Group Hunter. Normal, Hard and Hard+ use that difficulty's groups, like the daily — so on Hard+ the types, generations and colours you can spot on a sprite no longer count, and it is down to egg groups, shapes and the trickier groups.

4x3

Nine Pokémon hide four groups of three. Four groups of three is twelve places for nine Pokémon, so three of them belong to two groups at once. Pick three that share something and submit.

A group you find stays on the board, its Pokémon marked with a dot in the group's colour (two dots if a Pokémon is in two groups), because they may still be part of another one. Every wrong trio costs a life and you have three. Find all four to win. Like the daily, it is the same board for everyone that day, in Images or Letters and in every difficulty.

Unlimited

Unlimited mode drops the one-a-day limit. You play puzzles back-to-back in a single run, and the run continues as long as you keep solving. Lose a puzzle and the run ends with your final streak. This mode requires an account, since runs are saved server-side.

You can set the difficulty and overlap for a run, and each combination has its own ranking — Normal, Hard, Hard+, and the No-overlap variants each keep a separate leaderboard.

You can also filter which categories show up (generations, types, specials). That makes for good practice, but a filtered run is a custom mode and does not count towards any ranking.

Adventure

Adventure mode is a map instead of a single board. You travel a region node by node, solving a puzzle at each stop, and a node only opens once you have cleared everything it depends on — so the region unfolds as you progress. Kanto, Johto and Hoenn are playable, with more regions on the way.

These puzzles are hand-made rather than generated, built from references to the games and the ways Pokémon connect to each other. Do not expect the daily categories here.

Mistakes are counted but they do not punish you — there is no failing out of a node, so you can take as long as you need. Gym nodes award a medal when you beat the leader, and clearing a node without a single mistake earns a flawless clear.

Once you have cleared every stop in a region you can replay it from the map: everything locks up again and you travel the whole region from the start. A replay never touches your medals or your records — nothing is granted, removed or overwritten — and the run is kept on the device you are playing on.

Community puzzles

Community puzzles are made by other players: the same board of 16 Pokémon and four hidden groups, but the categories are whatever their author came up with. You do not need an account to play them — open one and start grouping.

There are no lives here, so you cannot lose: wrong guesses are only counted as mistakes and the puzzle ends when you have found the four groups. There are no hints either — a hint colours the four tiles you picked, which on a sixteen-tile board would hand you the whole thing.

The author also decides how the board looks: sprites, or the Pokémon names written out. A puzzle in Letters mode says so on its card and above the board, because some categories only work when you read them.

You can like a puzzle with the ♥ and share it with the link button. Without an account, the puzzles you play and like are kept on your device; log in and they move to your account, so the Liked and Played tabs follow you to any other browser.

Creating one needs an account: build your own puzzle, save it as a draft while you work on it and publish it when the four groups are named and full. If you run into a puzzle that is offensive or plain wrong, the flag button on it sends it to moderation.

Pokédex and leaderboard

Every Pokémon you solve is recorded in your Pokédex, which turns the daily habit into a long-term collection goal — there are a lot of Pokémon, and the only way to fill it is to keep playing. The Pokédex requires an account: it is tied to your profile, so you need to be logged in to open it and to have your discoveries recorded.

The leaderboard ranks players by wins, best daily streak and best Unlimited streak. You can play the daily puzzle without an account, but stats, streaks, medals, the Pokédex and the rankings all need one.