What you see: one feature decides another. Behind it: conditional rule; set aside by the vocabulary ruling pending BL-237.
Start here — one guess
Before you read anything, look at this for 30 seconds and decide what goes in the empty cell.
This one is meant to resist a quick read. If no single turn, count, or mirror explains the grid, you are probably in this family. The rule is hidden — it lives in a total that stays fixed, or in one attribute that quietly decides another. Finding the hidden rule is the whole skill.
The family in one sentence
Conditional & rule-based: the rule is not a single visible change — you must discover a hidden rule, a dependency, or several rules at once.
These are the hardest items on real tests, and the ones that separate strong solvers. Nothing turns or grows in an obvious way. Instead, something is kept — a count, a balance — or one thing controls another.
A hidden rule: three attributes look free, but only a few combinations ever appear — they are locked together.
What this family looks like
The grid looks busy or plain, but the simple families don't fit. No clean rotation. No mirror. No steady step. When you feel that, switch to three questions:
- Is something conserved? A total — orange dots per column, shapes per row — that never changes, even as positions move.
- Does one attribute decide another? The shape sets the rotation. The colour sets the size. Same value, same result, every time.
- Are two rules running at once? A turn and a move. A size rule and a colour rule. You must satisfy all of them.
You won't recognise this family from a single visual cue. You recognise it because the easy families failed — and that is itself the signal.