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How to Play

In Triple Place, your goal is to place a letter in every square of the grid. However, there are two restrictions on how letters can be placed:

  1. Each letter may only appear in each column once.
  2. The squares in each row must be grouped into "triples", groups of 3 squares that each contain one another's "header letters" in a cycle; the top row of the grid is a "header" row that assigns a "header letter" to each column.

A "triple" will have a structure like this:

Here, column A contains letter C, column C contains letter B, and column B contains letter A, in a 3-column loop.

To place letters in the grid, press on the square you want to fill, then drag to the column of the letter that you want to fill into that square.

Once you fill in the second letter in a "chain", the third letter in the triple can be automatically deduced. For convenience, the third letter will be filled in automatically to complete the triple once the second letter is placed:

Backreferences

Each square has a smaller square in its top-left corner; this is called its "backreference box". When you fill in a square with a letter, the square in the same row under that header letter will automatically be populated with a "backreference".

In this example, since the square in column A contains "B", the backreference of the square in column B contains "A". Backreferences allow you to quickly check both forward and backwards through chains or cycles.

When a square has a backreference, it becomes very easy to rule out letters that cannot possibly be placed in it. In this example, the square in column A is referencing column B, and column B needs to reference a third column, which will itself reference column A, completing a triple. This means that the third column must be a column that does not already contain "A" anywhere.

Tips

Although there are only two rules, you may need to think a few moves ahead to avoid painting yourself into a corner where you will become unable to make a move. There are a few rules of thumb that you can use to quickly figure out where you can make placements.

  • A square must not be filled with a letter if:
    • The letter already appears in the row.
    • The letter already appears in the column.
    • Doing so would create a cycle of only 2 lettersw.
    • Doing so would create a chain of 4 or more letters (such as connecting one chain to another).
    • The square has a backreference, but the column under the letter already contains the backreference letter (see: the explanation of backreferences for more details)
  • A square must be filled with a letter if:
    • The square is the only blank square in the row, and that letter is the only unused letter in the row.
    • The square is the only blank square in the column, and that letter is the only unused letter in the column.
    • That letter does not appear in that square's column yet, but that letter already appears in every other row where the column is open.

This is not a full list of all of the tricks that can be used to speed up the process of solving a puzzle. You will discover additional shortcuts on your own, but these cover many of the basic cases that you'll encounter.