Grid Bid

Five rounds. Two goals each. Bid how many turns you need, then make it so.

Puzzles come from a pre-built bank. No account, no tracking; progress stays on this device.

Round1 / 5
Turn0 / –
Score0
Bid8turns

Study the board and goals first. Par is hidden until the round ends.

Draw a random tile here?

Solved

Par
Bid
Turns
Score

Game over

RoundBidParTurnsScore
Total0
Turn0 / 20
Score0
Draw a random letter here?

Game over

Score
Best

Stats

How to play

Each round is one puzzle: a 5x5 grid of tiles valued 1 to 6, and two goals that must both hold at the same moment. Look at the board, then bid how many turns you need (1 to 12). Once the bid is locked you cannot change it, and there is no undo.

Actions, one per turn

  • Slide a row or column one step. The tile pushed off the edge wraps around to the other end.
  • Swap two tiles that touch sideways or up and down.
  • Nudge a tile up or down by 1. A 6 nudged up becomes 1, and a 1 nudged down becomes 6.
  • Draw a random replacement for one tile from the bag. The tile you toss goes into the bag afterwards, so it cannot come straight back on the same turn. Draws are the only random action.

Rows are numbered 1 to 5 from the top and columns 1 to 5 from the left. Tap a goal to highlight its cells. An ascending run reads left to right, top to bottom, and along a diagonal from its top end. A full house is three of one value and two of another. An any row goal holds when at least one row meets the condition.

Scoring

Every puzzle has a hidden par: the turn count of the best draw-free solution found by the solver (always 6 to 10). Par is revealed when the round ends. Using more turns than your bid is a bust and scores 0. Otherwise you score a Base set by how far your bid sits above or below par, plus a small bonus for finishing under your bid.

Base = 100 − 15 per turn bid above par (floor 10), or 100 + 25 per turn bid below par.
Bonus = 0, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9… for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5+ turns under the bid. It never reaches 15, so one extra turn of insurance always costs more than any number of overtricks can recover.

BidParTurnsScore
888100matched par exactly
98890one turn of insurance, one overtrick
108877two turns of insurance
787125beat the solver
8890bust
1281240max bid, used every turn
126619max bid on an easy grid
9109125beat par on a hard grid

A game is five rounds; the game score is the sum of the round scores.

Word mode

The same four actions on a grid of letters, with 20 moves and no bidding. Spell a word of 3 to 5 letters along any row, column or diagonal, in either direction. To lock it, choose Lock, tap its first letter, then its last letter, and confirm: the tiles change colour and the points are banked. Locking never costs a move. Locked tiles stay put: a line still slides, but its locked tiles do not move and the other tiles slide around them; locked tiles cannot be swapped or drawn. Nudging a locked tile turns it into a wild tile that reads as any letter but scores nothing itself. A new word may reuse locked tiles as long as it adds at least one fresh tile. You cannot lock the same word twice, or both a word and its plural (DOOR and DOORS): pick one.

Word score = Scrabble letter values, plus 5 for a 4-letter word or 15 for a 5-letter word. End-of-game bonus for locking the whole board: +50 for all 25 tiles, +25 for 24, +10 for 23. Finish any time, or after the 20th move once you have locked what you can. The home screen has an option to list the words currently on the board.