How to play Quorum

The rule

Every group of touching equal numbers must be exactly that many cells. Touching means up, down, left or right, never diagonally. Numbers run from 1 to 5.

So a 3 belongs to a group of three 3s: 333 is right. Four 3s in a row, 3333, is too many, and two 3s with no room to grow is too few. A lone 1 is a group of one and needs nothing next to it. In fact it must have no other 1 next to it, or it would be a group of two.

There is no second rule. Two groups of the same number can never sit side by side, but that follows from the first sentence: touching equal numbers are, by definition, one group.

What is given, what is yours

Some cells already hold a number when the board opens. Those are given, and they cannot be changed. Every other cell is yours: tap it and pick a number. A given is never wrong; if the board stops making sense, the mistake is in one of yours.

One answer

Every board has exactly one way to be finished. That is what makes it a puzzle rather than a colouring exercise: each blank can be worked out from what is already there, and if you find yourself guessing, there is a deduction you have not seen yet. It is also what makes the times comparable. Everyone is solving the same grid, so the only thing that differs is how quickly they got there.

The clock

The clock starts the moment the board loads, not when you place your first number. Reading the board is part of solving it. Reloading the page does not restart the clock; it picks up where it was. You get one attempt per board, and the time it took is your result.

Quick and Hard days

Boards come in two sizes on a fixed weekly rhythm. Hard boards fall on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; the rest of the week is Quick. The pattern is fixed so it can be learned: knowing Thursday is a hard one is a reason to turn up on Thursday.

A Hard board should take about three minutes, a Quick board about one. The first figure is measured from real solves; the second is inferred from the number of deductions and will be corrected as more times come in.

Hints

A hint points before it tells. Press once and a cell is ringed, with a sentence explaining the deduction: that group of 4s needs one more and has one place left to go, say, or only one number can fit here without breaking the rule. Press again and the cell is filled in for you. The point of the first press is to teach the step, so the next board needs fewer hints than this one.

Hints also catch mistakes. If you have placed a wrong number, the next hint rings that cell first and says so, because every deduction after a wrong number is built on a false grid.

After each hint the button rests before it can be pressed again, and the rest gets longer every time: ten seconds after the first, twenty after the second, and so on. A hint has to be cheap enough to rescue someone genuinely stuck and dear enough that filling the whole board with hints can never win the day. Hints do not touch your streak.

Streaks

A streak counts the boards you have finished, back from today, and it survives until a day is genuinely missed. If today is untouched but yesterday was finished, the run is still alive and today is the chance to extend it.

Club holds a streak through one missed board. Miss a day and the run is still standing when you come back. One hold per streak, deliberately: a hold that covered every gap would let playing every other day keep a streak alive forever, and then the number would mean nothing. Two missed boards in a row still end it.

There are two boards a day, and finishing either one keeps your streak for that day.

Bridges, the second daily board

Bridges is played on the same day as the number board, with its own clock and its own ranking. Islands sit on a grid, each carrying a number from 1 to 8. Join them with straight bridges along rows and columns so every island has exactly its number of bridges.

A line between two islands takes one bridge or two, never more. Bridges never cross each other and never pass over an island. When the board is finished, every island can be reached from every other by crossing bridges. As with the number board, there is exactly one answer.

To draw, press on an island and drag towards the next island in its row or column. Drag again over the same line to make the bridge double, and once more to clear it. Tapping a bridge takes one off.

The trap on most hard boards is a pair that fits the numbers but seals itself off: two 1s joined to each other, or two 2s joined by a double bridge, are finished and cut off from everyone else, so that bridge is never right. Hints explain each step the same way they do on the number board.