Common Three (Ponder Club)

Common Three is one of the thirteen free daily games on Ponder Club, made by Calli and Eden at Flying Comet Games. Where Connections sorts words into flat groups, Common Three uses a Venn diagram: three coloured circles, yellow, red and blue, overlapping in the middle, with seven words or short phrases in a bank below.

On the board we played the circles carried no labels at the start, so the first job is to see what the words have in common. One day's bank read Lift, Tow, Fire, Pull, Pick Up, Rise and Hoist, all of which can mean raising or moving something, and the puzzle is to split them by finer senses. A word may fit one theme, two of them, or all three, and putting it in the right overlap is where the real deduction lies. You drag a word onto the diagram, or tap the word and then tap a region, and press Check. Five ticks at the top count the mistakes you have left.

Each puzzle is credited to a contributor from the Ponder Club community, whose name shows above the diagram. There is one puzzle a day for everyone, with a leaderboard, a comments thread for each day and a free archive of past puzzles. No account is needed to play. The site shows ads, and a one-time purchase removes them across Ponder Club.

It suits players who like Connections-style categories but want a shorter puzzle with more logic in where each word goes.