Thread (Mind Loft)

Thread is a film puzzle on Mind Loft, a free site of daily browser games. Each day nine films are described, each in one sentence written as if by someone who technically watched it and missed the point entirely. All nine share one hidden thread, which might be a director, an actor, a year, a city or a way of ending.

You type film titles in any order, and a wrong guess costs nothing. At any point you can call the thread. The earlier you call it correctly, the more it pays: on the board we saw, a right call was worth 6 points with seven to nine films still open, 4 with four to six open and 2 with three or fewer open. Three wrong calls lock the thread score at zero. A typical description from that day: a man steals a founding document because the map is on the back. Part of every board is planted to suggest a different thread, so calling it early is a gamble.

That gives two ways to play. An expert treats it as deduction, calling the thread from two or three tiles and a hunch. A casual player treats it as nine riddles with a reveal at the end. Both finish with a score out of 15. Everyone gets the same board, and the leaderboard ranks score, then how early the thread was called, then time.

A new board goes up at midnight US Eastern Time. Sundays run sixteen films and two threads. Mind Loft suggests Script (film and TV trivia), Focus (zoomed photos) and Niche (trivia grid) next.