Pattern Puzzle Quiz
Very hard. Advanced techniques required.
Standard play. Timer runs. Hints available.
About expert pattern puzzles
Expert puzzles stop being a line of numbers. You are given a 3×3 grid, and read across it the nine values go nowhere at all — because the rule does not belong to the sequence, it belongs to each LINE.
Read one row at a time. Every row climbs by a step of its own, or multiplies by a ratio of its own, and the bottom row states its rule in its own first two cells. That is the whole move, and it is a genuine deduction rather than a hunt: once you have the row's step, the missing cell follows.
How to play Pattern Puzzles
- A sequence or a grid is shown with one term missing. Pick the number that belongs there.
- Find the rule first. The simplest ones add a fixed step, or multiply by a fixed amount.
- Two steps may take turns — +5, +2, +5, +2 — so look at every other gap before you give up on a single step.
- Harder sequences are two, three or four series SHUFFLED together. Read every second, third or fourth term on its own and each one turns out to be simple.
- When the terms are laid out as a grid, the rule lives in a line: each row, or each column, follows a rule of its own.
- At the very top the lines mean nothing by themselves — it is their TOTALS that form a sequence, and the missing cell is whatever completes the last line.
- Numbers stay small at every level. Nothing here is won or lost on arithmetic; it is the rule that hides.