The first game I played was pretty easy, I guessed the right answer quickly for the following set of words:
Ring
Reception
Celebrant
Flowers
Ceremony
Wedding - Things associated with weddings
But I was stuck on the second game.
Kayak
Civic
Race car
Defied
Hannah
There was no association in meanings of these words I could think of. Lily looked at them, and said they were palindromes - the word that spells the same backwards as forwards. I knew the type of words, but only thought of meanings in association when looking at those words.
Words can be connected in many ways, meanings, word constructions, synonyms, actions, names of same type of things (e.g. name of water falls) ....
For example, the following words can be carried out by the same action - raise
Concerns
Donations
Children
Eyebrow
Voice
The following words are synonyms of "new"
Mint
Green
Novel
Fresh
Unused
After a few tries, I found the patterns of the game. Association by meaning is the easy one - if I don't know the words I can look them up in a dictionary. When the words have no common meaning, solution is most likely the common term before or after the words:
Black
Red
Yellow
Dead
Bering
are names of seas. They come before sea.
Angel
Victoria
Iguazu
Yosemite
Niagara
are names of famous waterfalls.
To play the game well, one needs knowledge base. The above games should be easy to those who are familiar with geography.
The following set of words might be hard for people who know nothing about football (soccer).
Corner
Bicycle
Free
Penalty
Goal
They are types of kicks in ⚽️.
Sometimes I was just stuck in a groove I was in, and could not figure out the answer. One way to get unstuck, is to let it sit for a while and revisited it at later time. Many times when I came back, and thought of it in a different way, the answer was so obvious!
Here is an example
Family
Bed
Bath
Dining
Living
Type of Rooms in a house.
The following is a set of words I came up:
Common
White throated
Collared
Ruddy
Dwarf
What is the common link of these words?
11-9-14-7-6-9-19-8-5-18 is the answer :)
Note -
1. some other sets of words
Chest
Dough
Hazel
Coco
Pea
(14-21-20)
Sewing machine
Drumkit
Car
Bicycle
Piano
(Things with 16-5-4-1-12)
2. This is just like route cause failure analysis in engineering. Failure occurs, observations collected, make hypothesis to see if it explains the observations and physics.
