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.
Sit with it for twenty seconds. The answer to this one lives in the chapter drill rather than on the page.
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.
Full access
Conditional and rule-based: the rest of this chapter is part of full access
You have read the lead-in. The tactics, the worked questions, the discrimination quiz, the cheat sheet and the reference card sit behind one payment, together with all eight chapters, their drills and mastery checks, a second form of every practice test, and the review queue.
$29 once · 12 months · 30-day refund
The course
This chapter is a lesson in the Matrigma Prep Course
The course carries the same eight chapters as ten pattern lessons, each with a guided think-through, a drill of unseen questions and a quiz, plus the full practice tests and your readiness report. Enrolling is free; full access opens the paid lessons.
Where to practise
The drill serves ten conditional and rule-based questions you have not seen, easiest first, with the explanation after every answer. The mastery check is six questions — two easy, two medium, two hard — at sixty seconds each, with no tactic on screen and no explanations until the end.