How to play

You get a 5x5 grid of letter tiles and 20 turns. Rearrange the grid into words, lock the words in to bank their points, and lock as many tiles as you can before the turns run out. The score counts at the end of the game.

Levels and free play

New game starts at level 1. Before you play each board, a bot plays the same board behind the scenes and its score sets the goal, shown under the header once it is ready. Reach the goal to pass the level and get a fresh board; miss it and the run ends. The goal is a share of the bot's score that grows with the level: 35% at level 1, then 5 percentage points more per level, up to 100% at level 14, rounded up to the nearest 10. Harder boards therefore get lower goals. The bar under the header shows the level, the goal and how far your score has got. Free play is a single board with no goal.

The grid and the bag

The 25 tiles are dealt from a bag of 98 Scrabble-style letters (no blanks). The other 73 stay in the bag; Draw mode shows how many of each letter remain. Every tile shows its point value in the corner.

Turns

Pick a mode, then tap the board. Each of these costs one turn:

• Slide: tap an arrow to move a row or column one step. The tile pushed off the edge wraps around to the other end.
• Swap: tap a tile, then a neighbouring tile (up, down, left or right) to exchange them.
• Nudge: tap a tile, then −1 or +1 to step it through the alphabet. A wraps to Z and Z wraps to A, so any letter is at most 13 nudges from any other.
• Draw: tap a tile to replace it with a random letter from the bag. The tile you toss goes into the bag afterwards, so it cannot come straight back on the same turn. Draw is the only random action and cannot be undone.
• Lock: tap the first letter of a word, then its last letter, and confirm. See below.

Choose an action first; nothing is selected when a board starts, and tapping a selected action again deselects it. Undo (↶) takes back your last move or lock, once per game. It is meant for misclicks and cannot follow a Draw, since the draw was random. A board cannot be ended early. When the 20th turn is spent, a Score button appears: press it to score the board, or undo the last move first. Locking the 25th tile scores the board at once.

The score in the header, and the level bar, always show the score as it stands right now with every bonus and penalty applied (never below 0), so it stays at 0 early on and starts climbing once the word points outweigh the tiles-short penalty. Reaching the goal in the bar means you would pass if the board ended this moment. Tap the level bar (or the score in the header) at any time for a popup with the current breakdown: word points, bonuses, penalty and how far the goal is. At the end, tap the word total on the result panel to see the words you locked.

Words and locking

• A word is 3 to 5 letters in a straight line: a row, a column, or a diagonal. It may be read in either direction, so tap the letters in the order you read them (last-to-first works for a word spelled backwards). A word may sit inside a longer run of letters.
• Words are checked against a list of about 13,500 common English words. No proper nouns or abbreviations.
• Locking banks the word's points and marks its tiles green. Locked tiles never move again: a line still slides, but its locked tiles stay put and the other tiles slide around them; locked tiles cannot be swapped or replaced by a draw.
• You may lock a new word that reuses locked tiles, as long as it adds at least one tile that was not locked yet. Crossing words is the main way to lock the whole board.
• You cannot lock the same word twice, and you cannot lock both a word and its plural (DOOR and DOORS, BOX and BOXES, CITY and CITIES): pick one.
• A locked tile can still be nudged to a neighbouring letter for one turn. That may break the word it was locked for; the points already banked stay banked.
• For two turns, a locked tile can be made wild (★): it reads as any letter in any word, but scores no points itself. Locking a word through a wild tile is allowed.

Scoring

Word = sum of its letter values, +5 for a 4-letter word, +15 for a 5-letter word.
Letter values: A E I O U L N S T R = 1 · D G = 2 · B C M P = 3 · F H V W Y = 4 · K = 5 · J X = 8 · Q Z = 10 · ★ = 0.

Final score = banked words + a completion adjustment for how much of the board you locked. The final score never drops below 0.

Locked tiles	Adjustment
All 25	+25, and +10 for every unused turn
24	+10
22 or 23	0
Under 22	−10 for each tile short of 22 (for example 17 tiles: −50)

So a game is really two jobs at once: find high-value words, and lock 22 or more tiles within 20 turns. Since every lock costs a turn, 4 to 6 words that cross each other usually beat many short ones.

After a game you can replay the same board (same letters, same draws). Replays do not count towards your stats or personal best, but the game remembers your best score on that board and tells you when you beat it.

Options

The home screen can list the words currently on the board, with their points, as a hint; tap a listed word to prepare it for locking. It is off by default. Your best score and recent games are kept on this device.

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