How to Play

Object of the Game

Place all sixteen tiles into the 4×4 grid to form eight valid words — four reading across and four reading down. When you have filled the grid with valid words, you have solved the puzzle! (Some puzzles have multiple solutions.)

A new puzzle is released every day, with a separate puzzle for each challenge level. You can play any unfinished puzzle as often as you like until midnight in your local timezone, when the next day's puzzle takes its place.

Scoring

While the goal is to completely fill the board with all 16 letter tiles, you may not always reach a perfect solution. You can still compete with friends by scoring incomplete boards.

Scoring follows Scrabble-style letter values. Each letter is worth a fixed number of points, and your score is the sum of the points for every tile that appears in a valid word — counting tiles once for each word they're part of. A tile sitting in a cell where both the row and column are valid scores twice.

If any rows or columns contain letters that don't spell an actual word, your score drops to zero.

Letter Values

• 1 point — A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T, U
• 2 points — D, G
• 3 points — B, C, M, P
• 4 points — F, H, V, W, Y
• 5 points — K
• 8 points — J, X
• 10 points — Q, Z

Moving Tiles

Tap a tile in the tray to pick it up, then tap a square on the board to drop it there. Tap a tile already on the board to pick it back up, then tap an empty square to move it, or tap another tile to swap their positions. Tap any tile a second time to cancel the selection.

Drag tiles from any location onto another location on the board or letter tray. Dropping a tile on another tile will cause the tiles to swap places.

Words are validated continuously as you play, so you can see immediately which rows and columns are working and which still need attention. The tray supports a few extra operations:

• Shuffle mixes the unplaced tiles into a fresh order, useful when you've stared at the same arrangement for too long.
• Sort arranges the unplaced tiles alphabetically.
• Undo and Redo step backwards and forwards through your placements.
• Restart clears the board entirely so you can start the level over from scratch.

Hints

Stuck? You can ask for a single hint per puzzle. Accepting a hint reveals all four letters of one word — either a complete row or a complete column from the intended solution. The position is chosen for you; you don't get to pick which word is revealed.

Hints come at a cost. Once you've taken a hint:

• The four hinted tiles score zero points for the rest of the game, even after you've placed them in the correct cells.
• Those zeroed tiles also contribute zero to any perpendicular word that crosses through them — so the impact ripples out across the whole grid, not just the hint word itself.

In other words: a hint helps you finish a stubborn puzzle, but the maximum possible score drops noticeably. It's a trade between getting unstuck and chasing a personal best.

Since all solutions can be mirrored across the diagonal of the board, playing the hint word in its diagonally opposite position will still be recognized as the hint and will not contribute to yout score.

Challenge Levels

Four puzzles are available each day — one at each of the four difficulty levels. The underlying mechanics are identical — what changes is the difficulty of the words found in the solution.

• Easy — A friendly starting point. The tile set is built so that its solutions are made up of common four-letter words.
• Medium — A step up. You have likely seen these words before, but solutions include words that may slightly more obscure.
• Hard — How's your vocabulary? The words in Hard puzzles are a bit more challenging to recognize.
• Insane — For the logophiles. The words used in these puzzles are rarely used in everyday English.