Word Grid
Sixteen letters, three minutes, and everybody hunting the same tray. A long word is worth many short ones, and any word two of you find is cancelled for both, so the game is as much about what nobody else will spot as about what you can see. Two to four players, or you against the bot.
The tray
- Sixteen letters are dealt into a four by four tray, and everybody at the table gets the same tray.
- A word is spelled by stepping from letter to neighbouring letter. Two cells are neighbours if they touch at all: side by side, one above the other, or corner to corner.
- No cell may be used twice in one word, so the longest word any tray can hold is sixteen letters.
- A word must be three letters or more and must be in the site's word list. Type it, press Enter, and the server checks the list and the path and lights up the path it found.
- Q is a plain Q. QUIET needs a U next to the Q like any other letter, because there is no Qu tile in this tray.
- A word that is not in the list, has no path, or that you have already found is refused and recorded as a miss. It costs you no points and nothing is deducted.
Scoring
- A three-letter word scores 1, a four scores 2, a five scores 3, a six scores 5, and a seven scores 8.
- Eight letters or more scores 12, which is the most any one word can be worth.
- A word that more than one player found scores nobody. Both copies are cancelled when the round ends, which is why nobody sees anybody else's words until then.
- While the round is live you can see how many words each other player has found, and never which ones.
The clock
- Everybody presses Ready. When the last player has, a three-second countdown runs and the tray opens.
- The round is three minutes long on the server's clock, and everybody's three minutes are the same three minutes.
- A word is timed when it reaches the server rather than when you pressed Enter, so a slow connection costs a little on every word and the page says so rather than pretending otherwise.
- The move deadline is a minute, and it only ends a round that never started: once the tray is open the round's own three minutes decide when it is over.
How a round ends
- The round ends when its three minutes are up, whoever is still typing.
- The scores are settled then, and only then: duplicates cancel, and every word left scores by its length.
- Equal scores share a place.
- A resignation puts that player out at once. Their words go with them, they cancel nothing, and the others hunt on.
- A player who never presses Ready forfeits when the move deadline passes.
- When it is over the tray is revealed: the longest words it held, including the ones nobody found.
Worth knowing before you start
- The word list is English, whatever language the rest of this site is showing you. It is the one part of Word Grid that is not translated, and that is a limit rather than a preference.
- The list is ENABLE with British spellings added from SCOWL: 185,276 words of two to sixteen letters, no names and no short abbreviations. Word Grid asks for three letters or more, so the shortest words on the list cannot be played here. The licences are at /static/lexicon/LICENCE-wordlists.txt and the exact build is recorded in /static/lexicon/wordgrid.manifest.
- Every tray is checked before it is dealt. At least forty words can be found in it, at least one of them seven letters or longer, at least three of the sixteen letters are vowels, and no more than two are J, Q, X or Z.
- A player over sixty words a minute, either across the whole round or across any twenty-second stretch of it, is disqualified and unrated. A strong player finds twenty-odd a minute, and the rate is not judged at all until ten words are in.
- A disqualified player takes no place and no rating change, the other players' results stand as they are, and the game log says who was disqualified and why.
- On a phone the box turns autocorrect, capitalisation and spellcheck off. Your word is folded to lower case before it is looked up either way, so a capital letter is never a different word.
- The bot has five strengths, drawn from the seed when the game is made. Even the strongest finds well under half of what is in the tray, because a bot that found everything would be a bot nobody plays twice.
The seed decides the tray and the bot's strength, and it is published when the round ends, so the whole round can be replayed from the log and checked. Nothing else is chance: the word list is fixed and public, the clock is the server's, and every word is timed by when it arrived.
Word Grid terms
- A path
- The chain of touching cells that spells a word. Each letter must touch the one before it, corners included, and no cell may be used twice.
- A duplicate
- A word that more than one player found. It is cancelled for everybody when the round ends, so it scores nobody.
- A miss
- A word sent that is not in the list, has no path in this tray, or that you had already found. It is recorded and costs nothing.
- The ceiling
- Sixty words a minute. A player faster than that over the round, or over any twenty-second stretch of it, is disqualified rather than believed.
- The reveal
- The longest words the tray held, shown to everybody once the round is over, whether or not anybody found them.