Shinobi Squads

Shinobi Squads is a free daily Naruto quiz on narutodle.app. You sort 16 characters into four hidden squads of four, ranked from Genin to Kage difficulty, and you can make up to four mistakes. A new puzzle appears every day at 00:00 UTC.

This Naruto quiz borrows the 16-tile grouping format the New York Times made popular and puts a shinobi on every tile: a portrait and a name. One squad might be a canon team such as Team 10, another a clan or the Akatsuki, another a shared ability like the Byakugan, and the last a hand-written link that only clicks once you think about the story.

Every Naruto quiz board is built from the site's own data: 210 characters with their clans, villages, traits and canon teams, frozen at the end of Naruto: Shippūden. Boards are assembled semi-automatically. Before a puzzle is published, a script tries every way of splitting the 16 tiles to confirm there is exactly one complete solution, and every Kage-tier squad is written and fact-checked by hand. Boruto is not included, and you never need an account.

Each round of this Naruto quiz follows the same loop. The steps cover the rules, and the example after them is a full solve. For the other modes, see how to play.

1. 1

   Scan all 16 tiles

   Open today's Naruto quiz and read the whole 4×4 board before clicking. Each tile shows a portrait and a name. Boards contain decoys, so you will usually spot more groups than there are squads.

2. 2

   Select four tiles

   Tap four characters you think share a hidden link. Deselect clears your picks, and Shuffle rearranges the tiles.

3. 3

   Submit and read the result

   A correct four drops into a banner at the top showing the squad's name, rank colour and kanji. A wrong submission costs one of your four mistakes, and if three of the four share a squad, the game says One away.

4. 4

   Solve the rest

   Once three squads are in, the last four tiles are the fourth squad by definition.

5. 5

   Check your score and share

   The game ends when all four squads are found or after your fourth mistake, when every answer is revealed. Your score is squads found (0 to 4) plus mistakes, and zero mistakes earns the Perfect seal. Sharing posts Shinobi Squads #N with one row of coloured squares per submission (🟨🟩🟦🟥), so your Naruto quiz result never spoils the answers.

A worked example. The 16 tiles: Might Guy, Neji Hyūga, Rock Lee, Tenten, Kakashi Hatake, Sasuke Uchiha, Danzō Shimura, Shisui Uchiha, Kisame Hoshigaki, Zabuza Momochi, Mangetsu Hōzuki, Suigetsu Hōzuki, Kabuto Yakushi, Karin, Shino Aburame and Ebisu.

Start safe. Guy, Neji, Lee and Tenten are Team Guy, a canon team of exactly four: the Genin squad. Kakashi stays behind: Guy's great rival belongs to a different squad.

Then the trap. Sasuke, Karin and Suigetsu are three of Taka's four members, and Kabuto, another face from Orochimaru's hideouts, looks like a fair fourth. But Jūgo is not on the board, so Taka cannot be a squad. The guess costs a mistake, and with no One away you know no three of those tiles belong together.

Kakashi, Sasuke, Danzō and Shisui carry the Sharingan (Chūnin); Danzō hides his under bandages and in his right arm. Kisame, Zabuza, Mangetsu and Suigetsu are the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist (Jōnin). Forget Mangetsu, who only appears in the war, and you get One away. The last four, Kabuto, Karin, Shino and Ebisu, are the Kage squad: wears glasses. Four squads with one mistake is a solid Naruto quiz run.

In this Naruto quiz, each board has one squad at each rank, and the rank tells you how hard that squad is to see. Each rank pairs a colour with a kanji taken from the Japanese rank names: 下 (lower) for Genin, 中 (middle) for Chūnin, 上 (upper) for Jōnin and 影 (shadow) for Kage.

Ranks are set per puzzle, by how well a group hides on that board, so the same kind of group can be Genin one day and Jōnin the next. The Kage squad is the one part of the Naruto quiz no script writes: a link from the story, such as who wears glasses, fact-checked before it goes live.

Colour never works alone. Every banner pairs its colour with a kanji seal, so a player with red-green colour blindness can still tell Chūnin from Kage. That follows WCAG success criterion 1.4.1, which says colour must not be the only visual means of conveying information. The rest of the site works the same way, with a symbol in every Classic cell, so this Naruto quiz is playable for everyone.

Squads come from the site's roster of 210 characters, and the size of a group decides how it behaves in a Naruto quiz. Counts as of 6 November 2026:

Canon teams make tidy squads because their line-ups are fixed: Team 7, Team 8 (Kurenai, Kiba, Hinata, Shino), Team 10 (Asuma, Shikamaru, Ino, Chōji), Team Guy, Team Minato (Minato, Kakashi, Obito, Rin), the Sound Four and Taka (Sasuke, Karin, Suigetsu, Jūgo). Kage-tier squads are written by hand: wears glasses (Kabuto, Karin, Shino, Ebisu), received someone else's eyes (any four of Kakashi, Danzō, Sasuke, Madara and Obito), Hokage reanimated by Orochimaru in the war (Hashirama, Tobirama, Hiruzen, Minato) and can use the Rasengan (Naruto, Minato, Jiraiya, Konohamaru).

Big groups breed red herrings. Edo Tensei covers 39 characters and overlaps with most other groups, so a few reanimated faces prove nothing. The best decoys in this Naruto quiz are single characters who fit several groups. Itachi Uchiha fits five: Uchiha clan, Akatsuki, Sharingan users, Mangekyō Sharingan and Edo Tensei. Put him beside three other Uchiha and three other Akatsuki members, and two groups compete for one tile.

Kakashi Hatake works the same way: Team 7, Team Minato, Sharingan users and received someone else's eyes. Ask which of those groups has three other members on the board, and which would fall short without him.

These six habits follow from how the boards are put together, and each one can save you a mistake in today's Naruto quiz.

• 一

  Start with the narrowest group. Groups with a fixed line-up are the safest opening. If Guy, Neji, Lee and Tenten are all there, Team Guy is hard to argue with. The roster has only four puppeteers (Sasori, Kankurō, Chiyo, Maki), so that group is just as tight.

• 二

  Find the tile that fits almost nothing. In the worked example, Ebisu has no clan and no kekkei genkai, and he shares a team with no other tile. His squad had to be something unusual. Odd tiles point to the Kage squad.

• 三

  Distrust three members of a famous team. Three members of a well-known team with the fourth missing is a classic decoy. Before you submit Sasuke, Karin and Suigetsu as Taka, look for Jūgo. No fourth member means no squad.

• 四

  Read One away, and read its absence. One away means three of your four tiles are right: swap one, keep three. A plain miss with no message means no three of those tiles share a squad, which rules out more than you might expect.

• 五

  Leave the Kage squad for last. You never have to crack the hardest link. Solve Genin, Chūnin and Jōnin, and the four tiles left over are the Kage squad. Spend your thinking on the middle ranks, where a Naruto quiz like this is won or lost.

• 六

  Shuffle to break false patterns. Tiles side by side start to look related. When stuck, press Shuffle and read the board again. For habits that carry over to the other modes, see the Narutodle strategy guide.

Each Naruto quiz format tests a different skill. Here is how Shinobi Squads compares with a typical list quiz and with the other daily games on narutodle.app.

The daily games work well together. Classic Narutodle is a good warm-up because it drills the attributes that later turn up as squads. Naruto Grid asks for breadth, one character per square. Finish with Shinobi Squads, the Naruto quiz that rewards spotting traps across the whole cast.