About 4Stack
A daily gaming trivia puzzle, written by hand and fact-checked before it runs.
4Stack gives you sixteen cards and asks you to sort them into four groups of four. The groups are drawn from gaming culture — franchises, hardware, esports history, streamers, speedrunning jargon, studio history, memes. You get four mistakes. One new puzzle goes live every day at midnight, and it's the same puzzle for everyone, so the person you argue with about it has genuinely seen the same board you did.
The format will be familiar if you've played the NYT's Connections. The difference is that every 4Stack is about games, which means the traps can be a lot more specific than a general-audience puzzle can risk. A board can quietly rely on knowing that Counter-Strike started life as a Half-Life mod, or that the Vita and the Wii U both belong to more than one category on the same board. That's the whole appeal, and it's also the thing that takes the most work to get right.
Who makes it
4Stack is made by Xavier Long at Akai Arts Studio — a one-person project, not a content farm and not a publisher's marketing site. It's fan-made and unaffiliated with any game company, platform, studio, or person who turns up on a board. Nobody pays to appear in a puzzle, and no puzzle is written to promote anything.
The site runs on advertising. That is the only revenue it takes, and it has no bearing on what goes into a puzzle.
How a puzzle gets built
Every board has to clear the same set of rules before it runs. These exist because breaking them produces puzzles that feel unfair rather than hard, and an unfair puzzle is the fastest way to lose a daily player.
- Real-world facts only. Boards are built on things that actually happened — release years, hardware, roster history, studio closures, documented moments. Characters and franchises appear as names and facts; the site doesn't use anyone's artwork, logos, or sprites.
- No two categories may share a talent pipeline. An early draft of puzzle #29 had both "CS legends" and "Valorant pros" on the same board. TenZ, yay and benjyfishy all legitimately belong to both — that isn't a clever trap, it's a board with no correct answer. It got rebuilt before it ran.
- Anchored on durable identity, not current rosters. Esports lineups rot within a year. A category built on who someone is survives; a category built on who they currently play for breaks the moment the transfer window opens.
- Traps are deliberate, and they're fair. Overlapping cards are the point of the format. The rule is that the overlap always resolves — there is exactly one arrangement where all sixteen cards fit, and a careful solver can find it from the board alone.
- Every puzzle gets a human fact-check before its air date. Drafting a board is one job and verifying it is another. Nothing goes live on the strength of "that sounds right."
Finished puzzles get an answers page with the full solution and a written breakdown of why each group connects and what the board was trying to do to you. If you're mid-puzzle and stuck, the hints page gives you nudges without spoiling anything.
What the site does with your data
Nothing leaves your device. Your streak, your stats and which puzzles you've finished live in your browser's local storage — there are no accounts, no logins, and no server holding your results. Clearing your browser data clears your streak, which is the trade-off for not asking you to sign up for anything. Advertising is served by third parties; the privacy policy covers what that involves and how to opt out of personalized ads.
Corrections and contact
Gaming trivia is a field where reasonable people disagree, and sometimes a board is just wrong. If you've found an error, think a category is ambiguous, or want to argue about whether Hades counts as a roguelike: xlong@akaiarts.com. Corrections to published puzzles get noted on that puzzle's answers page.
New to the format? Start with how to play, or just jump into today's puzzle.