Word grid game

Each round deals a 4x4 grid of letter cubes, sixteen squares in all, and the aim is to spell as many words as possible in the time. A word is traced from square to square: every next letter must be adjacent to the one before, above, below, beside or diagonally. No square may be used twice in one word, although a letter shown on two squares can appear twice. Words need at least three letters, and longer ones are worth far more. The letters stay hidden behind grey squares until Start is pressed, so nobody gets a head start by studying the letter grid. When the clock stops, the game shows the score, the words found and every word that was missed, whose path lights up on a tap.

Words can be entered in three ways, mixed freely:

• Drag: slide a finger or the mouse across the squares. Letting go submits the word.
• Tap: tap the squares one at a time, then the last one again or Enter. Tapping the square before the last takes a letter back.
• Type: type the word and press Enter. The squares light up along its path whenever the grid holds one.

Delete removes the last letter and Finish ends the round early. After each attempt a message confirms the word or gives the reason it failed.

Scoring rises steeply with length (Hasbro game guide C2187). A word of three or four letters earns one point, while eight letters or more earn 11, as much as eleven of the shortest words.

The Qu cube fills one square but counts as two letters. That steep curve is why the longest word in a round often decides it.

The daily grid of 29 September 2026 shows how the points add up. Its squares read, row by row:

Six of the words it holds score 20 points between them.

LISTEN starts in row 4, column 1 and ends in row 4, column 3. Each step moves to a touching square, and three of them run diagonally.

A word counts when it has a minimum of three letters, can be traced on the grid and appears in the word list. The English list is the open Letterpress word list by Loren Brichter, with 270,652 entries.

It holds every form of a word, so plurals and verb forms count: CATS and RUNNING score alongside CAT and RUN. Proper nouns such as LONDON are left out. British spellings such as COLOUR are accepted, and so are American ones such as COLOR.

Each word scores once per round, even when the grid holds it along two paths. In a game with friends, the classic rule is that any word on two or more lists is crossed off, so only unique words score.

To check whether a rejected word exists at all, the word unscrambler shows every word a set of letters can make.

Three minutes is the traditional length, and today's grid always uses it. The current Hasbro box has a sand timer that runs for 90 seconds, and its guide says to turn it over once for a traditional three-minute round.

New grids offer a choice: 1:30 to match the sand timer, 3:00 for the traditional length, or no limit, where the clock counts up.

The Today tab holds the daily grid, dealt in the browser from the date, the dice and the word list version. No server picks it, so every English player sees the same letters. It changes at midnight in the player's own time zone: GMT in a UK winter, BST in summer.

Daily results stay in the browser's local storage: grids played, the current streak of consecutive days, the best streak and the best score. A finished day shows its words again after a reload, and nothing is sent to a server.

The New grid tab deals a fresh grid and puts its short code in the page address. That shareable link opens the same letters for anyone, so friends can play at the same moment and compare lists. New grids never touch the streak.

Copy result copies one line with the words, points and maximum as numbers, plus the link. It names no words, so it spoils nothing.

The solver finds every word in a grid of real letter cubes, for checking a game played at the table. Type the sixteen letters row by row; spaces are ignored and the preview fills in as you go.

A Q is read as the Qu cube, and typing QU gives the same square. For a double-letter cube with two letters on one face, brackets such as (th) make them one square.

Once the grid is complete, its words appear grouped by length with points and a total, and tapping one lights its path. The list is the game's own. Only a 4x4 grid fits, so a 5x5 board from a larger edition cannot be solved.

The letters follow how often English uses them: E has 11 of the 96 faces, and every letter of the alphabet is on at least one die. These letter cubes are the game's own, because no publisher prints its cube faces in the rules.

The dice come from letter frequency in the common words of the list, ranked by use in film subtitles (FrequencyWords). Faces are shared in proportion, and F, J, K, Qu, V, W, X and Z get one each. Q appears only as Qu, since an English Q is nearly always followed by U. No die repeats a letter.

A shake of real dice sometimes leaves almost no vowels. The game then shakes again, identically in every browser, until 5 to 8 squares show a vowel (A, E, I, O and U). The grid must also hold at least 40 listed words. The methodology page explains how the lists are chosen.

A few habits tend to raise a score, because each one turns a single find into several.

• Endings: an S, ED, ER or ING beside a word already found often makes a longer one.
• Square by square: starting from each letter in turn catches words a quick scan misses.
• The missed list: tapping missed words after a round shows the patterns that slipped by.

The same eye for letter patterns drives the Ten Tangle scramble, a daily set of jumbled words against the clock.