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.

Controls

Everything happens on the board. Each of these costs one turn:

• Swap: drag a tile onto one of its four neighbours and let go. Locked tiles cannot move.
• Slide: flick a row or column, or drag a tile a long way along it. The whole line moves one step and the tile pushed off the edge wraps round to the other end. Locked tiles stay put and the rest slide around them.
• Nudge: press and hold a tile, then pick the letter before or after it in the alphabet (A and Z wrap round, so any letter is at most 13 nudges away). Locked tiles can be nudged too.
• Draw: press and hold a tile, then choose draw to replace it with a random letter from the bag. The old letter goes into the bag afterwards, so it cannot come straight back. Draw is the only random action and cannot be undone. The bag button in the header shows what is left.
• Lock: tap the first letter of a word, then its last letter. The word locks at once and its points are banked.
• Wild (two turns): press and hold a locked tile and choose ★. A wild tile reads as any letter in any word but scores no points itself.

In free play, Undo (↶) takes back your last move or lock, once per board. It cannot follow a Draw, since the draw was random. A board cannot be ended early. When the 20th turn is spent, press Score board to finish, or undo the last move first. Locking the 25th tile scores the board at once.

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. The moment your score reaches the goal the level is passed: the bar lights up, play on that board stops, and Next level takes you to a fresh board. Use up the 20 turns (or lock the whole board) below the goal and the run ends. Level runs have no undo and no board replay. 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. Free play is a single board with no goal.

The score in the header, and the level bar, always show the score as it stands right now, bonuses included. Tap either for the current breakdown.

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. Every tile shows its point value in the corner.

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 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, and they cannot be swapped. They can still be changed in place: nudged, drawn over, or made wild.
• 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.
• Nudging a locked tile may break the word it was locked for; the points already banked stay banked.

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 bonus for locking the whole board. There are no penalties.

Locked tiles	Bonus
All 25	+25, and +10 for every unused turn
24	+10
23 or fewer	0

Since every lock costs a turn, 4 to 6 words that cross each other usually beat many short ones, and clearing the whole board early is worth a lot.

After a free-play board 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 lock it. It is off by default. Your best score and recent games are kept on this device.

Close