How to play Pinpoint
Pinpoint is a guessing game rather than a grid. Five words all belong to one category, and your job is to name it. Three rules shape the round:
- You start with one clue. The rest are hidden.
- Every wrong guess reveals the next clue, so the puzzle gets easier as it goes.
- You have five guesses. Naming the category from one clue is a far better round than naming it from four.
Type what you think connects the words and press Guess. Spelling is forgiving: capital letters, punctuation, a leading "the" and simple plurals are all ignored, so "pasta", "Pasta shapes" and "types of pasta" are treated the same. Every wrong guess is crossed out in the box under the clues, so you can see what you have tried.
Tips for beginners
- Think broad, then narrow. The first clue is chosen to fit several categories at once. Hold two or three ideas rather than committing to the first that occurs to you.
- Let each clue rule things out. The second word is usually what kills your first theory. That is the game working, not you failing.
- Watch for property categories. Not every group is a taxonomy. Some are things that share a feature rather than a kind, and those are the hard ones.
- Guess the plain word. If you are torn between a simple category and an elaborate one, the simple one is usually the answer.
Where Pinpoint comes from
Pinpoint is a category guessing game, a kind of play that became famous on television long before it was a daily puzzle.
- 1961 Password A television game show where one player gives single-word clues and the other guesses the secret word.
- 1973 The $10,000 Pyramid In its final round, players guess a category from a list of examples given by their partner.
- Today Pinpoint Five clues arrive one at a time, and you name the category in as few as you can.
- Also known as
- Category puzzle
- Puzzle family
- Word association
- Our board
- Five clues, five guesses
- What it trains
- Finding what connects
Did you know? One famous Pyramid category was "Things With a Hole". Pinpoint categories work the same way: sometimes the link is a shared feature, not a kind of thing.
Is this the same as LinkedIn's puzzle?
No. This is our own Pinpoint, in the same five clues one category style. Every category is written and checked here, so the answers will not match any official daily answer. Each one is a plain matter of fact rather than opinion, and no clue ever repeats the answer. It is free, needs no account, and your streak is saved in your own browser.