How to Play a Whodunit Grid (Beginner Walkthrough)

May 16, 2026

If you’ve never solved a whodunit grid before, the first one will feel impossible for about three minutes and then suddenly snap into place. This walkthrough is the fastest way to get there. We’ll use a fresh five-suspect, four-category grid as the example — the same shape we publish at EveryClue on weekdays.

What you’re looking at

A whodunit grid has four parts:

Suspects: five people. One of them is the culprit.
Categories: usually four — profession, weapon, room, motive — though “profession” sometimes gets replaced by “outfit” or “alibi”. Each suspect has exactly one attribute per category.
Clues: usually 8–12. Each clue is a true statement.
Goal: figure out the culprit’s row in full — their profession, weapon, room, and motive.

The grid itself is a 5×4 table. Click a cell to assign that suspect an attribute in that category. The puzzle is solved when the culprit’s full row matches the hidden solution.

The two-pass method

The single biggest mistake beginners make is reading the clues while clicking cells. You’ll get yourself into trouble by clicking too early. Read first, then click.

Pass 1: scan for direct assignments. Look for clues of the form “X is the Y.” These are gifts — fill in those cells immediately. In most puzzles, three or four direct clues exist, and they handle about a third of the grid in the first thirty seconds. Don’t think yet, just transcribe.

Pass 2: scan for exclusions. Look for clues of the form “X is not Y” or “X did not use Y”. Don’t click anything in your grid yet — instead, in your head, cross those attributes off those rows. After the first pass + the exclusion pass, you should have a mental model of which cells are still wide open. Usually there are five or six.

Pass 3: positional and conditional. Now you can finally use the clues that say “to the left of”, “between”, “if … then”. These are the deductive workhorses, and they’re impossible to use until you’ve narrowed the search space first.

Where beginners get stuck

Three mistakes burn the most time:

1. Clicking based on one clue. A clue like “the doctor was in the kitchen” doesn’t tell you who the doctor is. Don’t put “kitchen” in any cell until you also know who the doctor is.

2. Treating “is not” as a positive statement. If the clue says “the actress was not in the library”, that does not mean she was somewhere specific. It means the library is one of four possible rooms for her — still narrowed, but not solved.

3. Forgetting that each category is Latin-square-constrained. This is the secret superpower of whodunit grids: each attribute appears exactly once. If you’ve established that four of the five suspects didn’t use the revolver, the fifth one did — even if no clue ever said so directly. Process of elimination is doing half the work.

Worked example (60 seconds)

Setup: Holmes, Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, Moriarty. Professions: detective, doctor, landlady, inspector, professor. Clues 1–4 say “Holmes is the detective”, “Watson is the doctor”, “Mrs. Hudson is the landlady”, “Lestrade is the inspector”.

Stop. Three of the four mistakes above can’t happen here because the clue list is doing the work for you. After ten seconds, you’ve assigned four professions. The professor is Moriarty by elimination.

That’s the kind of opener most easy-tier puzzles give you. Once you internalize the rhythm — direct → exclusion → positional → check — you’ll find yourself solving the first 70% in well under a minute, and spending most of your time on the last two cells.

Hints, lanterns, and other lifelines

Every reputable daily whodunit gives you a hint system. At EveryClue, you have five levels of hints, called lanterns in our parchment-noir theme:

Lantern 1 surfaces the most useful direct clue you might have missed.
Lantern 2 narrows the culprit to a pair.
Lantern 3 confirms the culprit row’s profession.
Lantern 4 confirms two more cells.
Lantern 5 reveals the full row.

A hint isn’t a defeat — it’s a tool. If you’ve been stuck on the same cell for two minutes, the marginal cost of lighting a lantern is small compared to the cost of giving up and not playing tomorrow.

Playing daily

The 90-second mark is achievable after about a month of daily play. The enjoyable mark — somewhere around 3 minutes, where you’re not rushing and the deductions feel earned — comes within a week.

Today’s case at EveryClue is a medium-difficulty grid. New ones drop at 00:00 UTC, in eight languages, free to play.