Word Grid Game
Trace real words through touching letters without reusing a tile. Practice uses frozen solver-validated 3×3, 4×4 and 5×5 boards, while familiar main words drive completion and lower-frequency accepted words become Bonus finds.
How Word Grid works
A Word Grid board is a square of letters. Start on any tile, then move to a touching tile horizontally, vertically or diagonally. You may change direction at every step, but the same tile cannot be used twice inside one word. A three-letter path therefore needs three different cells even when the word repeats a letter. The browser checks the actual path rather than accepting a typed word that cannot be traced on the board.
The game is designed around discovery rather than a single hidden answer. Every validated board contains a set of main words that count toward completion. When you find one, the progress bar advances and the score increases according to word length. Longer words are worth more because they require a longer valid route through the same fixed grid. You can keep searching after short words to improve your score and coverage.
Main words and Bonus words solve a common word-game problem
A huge dictionary can make a board feel unfair if rare entries are required for a perfect clear. A tiny dictionary creates the opposite problem: a legitimate word can be traced perfectly and still be rejected. Word Grid separates those jobs. The scoring vocabulary is frequency-ranked, so 15,000 more familiar entries form the main set. A further 4,458 lower-frequency entries remain accepted as Bonus words. Bonus finds are celebrated and recorded but never block board completion.
This distinction means the completion target stays understandable while exploratory vocabulary still has value. The runtime does not invent a list after you start playing. It exact-solves the chosen frozen board against the same 19,458-entry lexical data and separates the resulting traceable words into main and Bonus sets.
Four Practice styles change the real board or time pressure
Express uses a compact 3×3 board for quick scans and short routes. Zen uses the standard 4×4 board without a countdown so you can study the grid at your own pace. Sprint uses a 4×4 board with a three-minute clock and rewards quick recognition. Big Board expands to 5×5 and gives five minutes, creating more branching paths and many more plausible letter combinations. These are real play changes, not separate doorway pages pretending to be different games.
Validated frozen boards instead of uncontrolled random grids
Random letter soup is easy to generate but often produces weak games: too few familiar words, no satisfying long path, or one unusual letter that contributes almost nothing. The V0.70 build step therefore generates candidate boards offline and runs the same adjacency solver used by the product. A board is frozen only when it meets the profile’s main-word range, long-word requirement and letter-diversity checks. The release contains 1,024 Express boards, 4,096 Standard boards and 1,024 Big boards.
Drag on touch, type on a keyboard
On touch or with a pointer, begin on a letter and drag through neighboring cells. The current path is visibly selected while you move, and sliding back one step lets you correct the last tile without starting over. Keyboard players can type letters to extend a valid adjacent route, press Backspace to remove the last tile, Enter to submit and Escape to clear the current path. Board cells are native focusable buttons, and the interface does not require a mouse.
Hint and Tile Coach are explicit study aids
Hint selects one remaining main word, tells you its length and highlights the starting tile. Tile Coach goes broader: each tile can show how many remaining main words begin there. Both tools can teach scanning strategy, but they provide information beyond unaided play, so either one marks the run Assisted. Turning Tile Coach off later does not restore Clean status. Clean personal bests therefore remain comparable with other unaided runs on the same style.
Autosave protects a real board in progress
Practice progress is stored only in your browser. The save records the active style, seed, exact frozen board, main and Bonus finds, Assisted state and timer timestamps when relevant. Returning to that same mode can restore the position instead of quietly creating a different puzzle. Local stats track games, clears, clean clears and style-specific bests. They are not presented as a global leaderboard, rating, percentile or account-backed ranking.
A useful scanning routine
Start by looking for common short endings and prefixes around dense vowel areas, but do not stare at one corner for too long. Trace three- and four-letter words quickly to learn which cells connect well. Then revisit high-connection letters and search outward for five- and six-letter routes. Because diagonals count, a useful route can zigzag rather than reading like ordinary text. If one tile appears in many promising paths, remember that it can be reused across different words; the no-reuse rule applies only within a single submitted word.
When progress stalls, compare the remaining word-length counts before using a Hint. Knowing that several six-letter words remain changes how you scan: look for branching consonant-vowel chains with enough unused neighboring cells to continue. Tile Coach is best treated as a post-attempt learning tool—make your own scan first, then use the start counts to see which areas you systematically overlooked.
Daily is separate from Today’s 6
The Daily Word Grid serves one validated 4×4 board for each calendar date. It has its own local solve history and specialist streak. It does not enter the existing Today’s 6 rotation or alter the six-game Daily Score. That keeps the established daily contract stable while giving Word Grid a same-board repeat-visit loop of its own.