4Stack #1 — answers & breakdown
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
The very first 4Stack. We kept the opener broad on purpose — four categories that anyone who has touched a controller in the last thirty years should recognise — but the purple group still catches people out on a technicality.
The sixteen cards in this puzzle were: Zelda, Metroid, Kirby, Splatoon, Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, Warzone, Halo, DOOM, Counter-Strike, Overwatch, Hades, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, The Binding of Isaac.
The four stacks
Nintendo franchises
Zelda, Metroid, Kirby, Splatoon
Three of these date back to the 8- and 16-bit eras; Splatoon is the odd one out at 2015, and it is the only Nintendo franchise here that was born on a home console with online multiplayer as the entire point.
Battle royales
Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, Warzone
PUBG is the game that turned battle royale from an Arma mod scene into a genre. Apex Legends took the opposite launch strategy — no marketing build-up, it simply appeared one day in 2019 and had tens of millions of players inside a week.
Legendary FPS series
Halo, DOOM, Counter-Strike, Overwatch
Counter-Strike is the ringer: it began life as a Half-Life mod before Valve bought it outright. If you had it pencilled into a 'started as mods' group, that instinct returns in a later puzzle.
Roguelikes
Hades, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, The Binding of Isaac
Purists will tell you these are roguelites, not roguelikes — they have permanent between-run progression, which the 1980 original Rogue very much did not. We used the colloquial label, and a few people let us know about it.
Want to try it yourself? Play puzzle #1 — archive plays don't affect your streak. Or jump into today's puzzle.