🔺 Trio Spotter
🧩 Puzzle · 18 playsTrio Spotter
Twelve cards, four features, one rule: all the same or all different.
About Trio Spotter
Twelve cards on the table, each carrying four features — how many symbols, what shape, what fill and what colour. A valid set is any three cards where every single feature is either the same across all three or different across all three. It sounds fiddly written down and takes about ten seconds to click, after which you will be spotting sets before you have finished reading the board.
How to Play
Tap three cards to claim a set. For each feature — count, shape, fill, colour — all three cards must match, or all three must differ. Claim a set and fresh cards replace it.
💡 Tips & Strategy
The fundamental fact: any two cards have exactly one card that completes them. Pick a pair, work out what the third must be — same count or the missing count, same shape or the missing shape, and so on — then look for that specific card. Searching for one known card is far quicker than eyeballing trios.
Sort the table by colour in your head. Every set is either three cards of one colour or one card from each colour group. If one colour has only two cards on the table, no all-same-colour set can exist in it, and you can stop looking there entirely.
Most people miss the all-different sets, because same-ness jumps out and difference does not. Make a deliberate pass hunting for trios where the fills are solid, striped and empty, or the counts are one, two and three. That pass alone finds the sets everyone else is staring past.
If the board looks empty, work systematically instead of faster: take each card in turn, pair it with every card after it, and name the completer. Twelve cards is only sixty-six pairs, and a stubborn board rarely survives half of them.