11+ Verbal Reasoning Game

How the game works

Pick a question type and beat the clock. Every correct answer adds to your score and builds a streak, and a streak of three or more multiplies everything that follows, so a good run is worth far more than a careful one.

Get one wrong and the clock stops. The right answer appears with a plain explanation of how it works, you read it, and you carry on. Nothing is lost by being wrong except the streak, which is the point: the questions you miss are the ones worth learning, and the game keeps them so you can practise just those.

Hidden Words plays the way the real paper reads. The word is hiding across two words of the sentence, and you sweep your finger across the letters, or tap the first letter and then the last, to highlight it.

Word Grids shows six words in two rows of three, with one word missing. The link runs down the columns or across the rows, and when you get one wrong the grid shows you which way to read it.

Start with one type at a time

A child meeting letter codes for the first time should play a codes round on its own before mixing types. Each round explains its own questions when you get one wrong, so a few slow rounds on a new type teach the method faster than a worksheet. When most types feel comfortable, the Big Mix shuffles everything, which is how the real paper asks them.

Why these seventeen types

Sixteen of them follow the GL Assessment verbal reasoning classification that most grammar school and independent school papers draw from: vocabulary questions like synonyms and opposites, letter puzzles like hidden words and codes, and reasoning questions like analogies and logic. The letter code questions even print the A to Z line above the question, because the real papers do.

The seventeenth, Word Grids, is a newer puzzle built from six words. It practises the same skill as analogies: working out exactly how two words are linked, then finding the word that is linked in the same way.

Fourteen of the seventeen types use questions that were written and checked one at a time, the same way we build our tutoring material, so each question has exactly one right answer. Letter codes, letter series and letter pairs work differently: the game builds a fresh question each time, following a fixed rule, so those three types never run out.

Common questions

Carry on with these