Each game of the Swordquest series was themed after the classical elements: earth, fire, water, and air. Each game required the player to move through a maze of rooms, collecting objects from one and placing them in other rooms. The arrangement or theme of the rooms varied with each game: Earthworld was themed after the Western zodiac, Fireworld after the Kabbalah tree of life, Waterworld after the chakras, and with Airworld to have been modeled after the I Ching.[1] Traversing between rooms sometimes required the player to complete a "twitch"-style minigame to progress. When the player placed an item in its correct room, they would be presented with numerical clues that referred to a page and panel within the comic that was packaged with the game. There, the player would find a hidden word that was part of the larger Swordquest contest, as by submitting all the correct words in the correct order to Atari, they would be entered into the next phase of the project.[2] The discovered words would form a relevant phrase towards the larger contest. In at least two cases, for Earthworld and Fireworld, there were more clues indicated by the game than required to be submitted. Players also had to identify a second clue in the game's instruction manual (for Earthworld, indicating prime numbers to use only clues on prime numbered pages) to know which clues to send in.[3][1]