Published: 20 May 2026 | Author: Team JanVayu | Reading time: 5 min
Twelve days after the Learning Games panel opened with six games, it has a seventh: Vayu Junction. It is a word-grouping puzzle with sixteen tiles, four hidden groups of four, and four strikes allowed. You tap four tiles you think share a connection and press Submit. If you are right, the group locks in with a colour. If you are wrong, you lose a strike.
If you have played BBC's Only Connect, the daily NYT Connections, or the Torchlight climate puzzle at Times of Climate Change, you know the mechanic. The content is ours. Every group is built from India's air-quality vocabulary: the abbreviations, the regulators, the seasonal markers, the policy stages, and the cities that keep appearing in IQAir's annual report.
Why this game
The dashboard shows what is happening, and the Jeopardy board tests what you know. Vayu Junction asks whether you can see how the terms relate to each other. That is the skill you need to read a CPCB notification, an NCAP scorecard or a GRAP order and follow what it says.
When people play Connections or Torchlight, a group clicks and they learn a category they did not know they were learning, such as "Oh, those are all types of carbon." That sticks better than a flash card, because the player made the connection. A round also fits in a metro ride.
How the puzzles work
Each puzzle has four groups, and each group has a difficulty colour: green is straightforward, yellow medium, red hard and purple devious. The devious ones rely on deliberate misdirection. A tile like CO is a criteria gas and also the start of CO2, COPD or CO-funded. Diwali is a festival and also a smog-season trigger. RTI belongs to "citizen-action acronyms" and could also look like "things that begin with R". When you are one tile off, the game says "three of your four belong together, swap one", so you get a hint short of the answer.
Four puzzle sets come with this release.
1. Basics (easy)
- Particulate fractions: PM1, PM2.5, PM10, TSP
- Criteria gases under NAAQS: NO₂, SO₂, CO, O₃
- CPCB AQI bands (lower half): Good, Satisfactory, Moderate, Poor
- Indian air-quality regulators: CPCB, CAQM, MoEFCC, DPCC
If you have read JanVayu for five minutes, you should clear this set without a strike.
2. Sources, seasons and protection (medium)
- PM2.5 combustion sources: Diesel, Coal, Biomass, Crackers
- Smog-season months in north India: November, December, January, Diwali
- Delhi GRAP stages: GRAP-I, GRAP-II, GRAP-III, GRAP-IV
- Mask and filter terms: N95, FFP2, HEPA, CADR
The trap here is Diwali. It is a festival and not a month, but it marks the peak of the smog season, so it belongs in that group.
3. Names and numbers (hard)
- Worst-polluted Indian cities, IQAir 2025: Loni, Byrnihat, Delhi, Ghaziabad
- NCAP top-performing cities: Varanasi, Bareilly, Firozabad, Dehradun
- Air-quality research bodies and reports: CREA, AQLI, IQAir, Lancet
- Citizen accountability tools: Petition, RTI, Audit, Survey
You either know these or you do not, because nothing here can be worked out. We chose names that JanVayu readers will have met on the dashboard or in the Zotero library.
4. Devious
- Types of "___ carbon": Black, Brown, Blue, Green
- Indian vehicle emission standards: BS-II, BS-III, BS-IV, BS-VI
- Citizen-action acronyms: PIL, RTI, FIR, NOC
- PM-precursor gases: NOₓ, SOₓ, VOC, NH₃
This is the hardest set. Brown could be a colour or part of "brown-field site". RTI could be the citizen tool or something else if you read the brief carelessly. BS-V is missing from the emission-standards group because India skipped BS-V and went straight from BS-IV to BS-VI, which applied nationwide from 1 April 2020. The puzzle expects you to know that.
What you take away
After three or four runs you should be able to name, without hesitation:
- the four CPCB AQI bands below "Very Poor" and "Severe";
- the four GRAP stages, and which one bans construction;
- four of India's most polluted places (IQAir 2025) and four cities named among NCAP's top performers;
- the four main PM-precursor gases;
- the fact that BS-V was skipped.
The rest of JanVayu, including the dashboard, the policy tracker and the accountability briefs, assumes you already know these. The puzzle teaches them up front.
Try it
Vayu Junction is at the right end of the Learning Games tab bar. Tap it and pick a puzzle. Your score is not saved or sent anywhere, and there is no leaderboard. If the puzzles feel too easy, try Devious. If a category seems wrong, open an issue. The puzzles are kept in one list that we can edit in two minutes.
We will add new puzzles every few weeks. If you want one for a city or a school curriculum, an RWA, a classroom or a journalists' desk, write to contribute@janvayu.in and we will add it.
Credits
The form comes from BBC's Only Connect, by way of the daily NYT Connections and the Torchlight climate puzzle at Times of Climate Change. The content is JanVayu's own, written from the primary sources used across the site: CPCB, CAQM, IQAir 2025, NCAP scorecards, the Lancet Countdown 2025, CREA's monthly snapshots, and Dr. Sarath Guttikunda's work at UrbanEmissions.info. The Jeopardy clue list in the first game, tested in classrooms, is the teaching work that made us start building these games.
Team JanVayu