7 Strategies to Solve Pyralinks Puzzles Faster
Tested techniques from experienced players to lower your guess count and solve time.
Published February 2, 2026 · Updated February 16, 2026
After your first few Pyralinks puzzles, you start to develop intuition for how the pyramid works. But there is a difference between getting through a puzzle and solving it efficiently. These seven strategies come from patterns we have seen experienced players use repeatedly. Whether you are trying to reduce your guess count, lower your solve time, or just get unstuck on a tricky puzzle, these approaches will help.
1. Start With Constrained Items
Depending on the kind of puzzle, some items may have fewer possible connections or placements. Spending time on these early can help reduce the problem space without introducing a large amount of uncertainty.
For example, in Pyrithmetic, multiplication and division tend to have fewer possibilities for combining numeric nodes, so starting with those operations is often helpful.
In Pyraphemes, some word fragments may be less likely to work as both the start and end of a word. Fragments that are clear word endings would need to be placed in the bottom level, and a good candidate for finding a potential parent to link with.
2. Use Link Marking Strategically
Link marking is not just a visual aid - it is a reasoning tool. When you mark a link between two nodes, you are committing to that relationship and freeing your mind to think about the remaining unknowns. Marked nodes also move together during swaps, which means you can rearrange larger sections of the pyramid without breaking the connections you have already established.
The most effective approach is to mark links as soon as you are confident about them, even if the rest of the puzzle is still uncertain. Each marked link reduces the problem space, allowing you to focus your attention on the remainder.
3. Prioritize a Metric of Choice
There are multiple ways to measure your performance. You can prioritize the amount of time it takes to solve a puzzle, the number of swaps to get there, or the number of guesses required.
If your top concern is time, perform a reasonably quick arrangement and check your results. While you are unlikely to have solved the full puzzle, correct links will be locked-in, greatly reducing the search space for solving the remainder.
If your top concern is swap counts, leverage the link marking feature. Moving a linked group counts as a single swap instead of one swap per node. In this way, linking nodes can help reduce the swaps needed to solve a puzzle.
If your top concern is number of guesses, try not to concern yourself with time or swaps. Continue to rearrange items and review the pyramid until you have achieved a level of confidence worthy of submitting a guess. When sharing your puzzle results, you can disable the Advanced Share feature in Settings to avoid including time and swap counts in your shared image.
4. Avoid Being Inflexible
You may see a pair of nodes that you are sure fit together, like hand-in-glove. Perhaps it is a very common phrase, or something rare which you are proud to have discovered. While it might be valid, it might not be part of the correct solution.
The solution requires that every link is supported, and sometimes that means avoiding an "obvious" pairing if that local choice prevents achieving the full solution.
5. Use Process of Elimination
Sometimes you cannot determine where an item goes directly, but you can determine where it does not go. If an item has no plausible link to two of three possible parents, it most likely belongs under the third. This kind of elimination is especially useful in the middle levels of the pyramid, where constraints come from both above and below.
After a guess, correct links lock into place. Use those locked links as anchors and ask: given what I know is correct, which positions are still possible for each remaining item? Often, a single correct link eliminates multiple wrong options elsewhere in the pyramid.
6. Save Your Guesses
With a limited number of guesses, submitting too early is the most common mistake. Each guess gives you information, but it also costs you one of your finite attempts. The optimal strategy is to arrange as much of the pyramid as you can through reasoning alone, then submit a guess to confirm your work and reveal the parts you got wrong.
A good rule of thumb: do not guess until you have marked at least half the links in the pyramid. If you are guessing with most links unmarked, you are essentially asking for feedback on a random arrangement, which wastes a guess. Build your solution first, then verify.
7. Learn From Feedback
After each guess, pay close attention to which links were correct and which were wrong. The pattern of correct and incorrect links tells you a lot about the structure. If the entire left branch is correct but the right branch is wrong, your root and left subtree are solid and you just need to rearrange the right side.
Over time, you will also notice patterns across puzzles. The more puzzles you solve, the faster you recognize these patterns in new puzzles.
Putting It All Together
The best solvers combine all of these strategies fluidly. They look for constrained items, externalize relationships using link marking, eliminate impossible positions, and guess when they have a reasonably confident arrangement. With practice, this process becomes second nature, and puzzles that once took three guesses start falling in one or two.
The most important tip is also the simplest: play every day. Daily practice builds pattern recognition faster than any strategy guide. Each puzzle teaches you something about how relationships work in the pyramid structure, and that knowledge compounds over time.
