How to play Wordgrid

Wordgrid is our word game: a five by five grid, one word planted across the middle, and two players growing new words out of it, one letter at a time. It rewards a good vocabulary, but it rewards a sneaky one more, because the letter you place is also the letter your opponent gets to build on.

The board and the pieces

The grid starts almost empty. Only the middle row is filled, with the seed word SHEEP, the same seed in every game, so nobody gets a luckier start than anybody else. There are no tiles and no letter bag: on your turn you may write any letter you like into an empty square. Everything grows from the middle outward.

How you win

Every word you play scores its length: a four letter word is four points. When the grid is full, or a player has no legal move, the game ends and the higher score wins. A level score goes to the second player. That is a real rule, not a tie-break, and it exists because moving first in Wordgrid is worth real points. It also means there are no draws: every game of Wordgrid has a winner.

The rules that matter

A move has two parts. First, write one letter into an empty square that touches a filled square: up, down, left or right, never diagonally. Second, trace a word through touching squares that uses your new letter. The path can twist and turn as much as it likes, but it moves through side-by-side squares only, and it cannot visit the same square twice.

The dictionary decides. A word counts if it is in our dictionary, a fixed published word list that is identical for both players in every game. Two letter words count. Names of people and places do not, because they are not in the list.

No word scores twice. Once a word has been played in a game it is spent, for both players, and that includes SHEEP itself, which is why the seed is worth nothing.

If you are stuck, the game ends. There is no passing in Wordgrid. If the player to move has no legal move at all, the game ends on the spot and the score as it stands decides it, with a level score going to the second player, as always.

How a match works on Dream Games

Both players put up the same stake, and both stakes are set aside before the first move. The winner takes 90% of the pot and we keep 10% as our fee. A level score goes to the second player, so a game of Wordgrid never ends level from play. The only draw is one you both agree to, and that returns both stakes in full.

Each player has ten minutes on the clock for the whole game. Your clock only runs while it is your turn. Run out of time and you lose, even if you are ahead on the board.

Try it

The best way in is simply to play. Practice is free: pick a bot on easy, medium or hard, or send a friend a link. Nothing is staked and nothing is recorded, so you can experiment as much as you like.

When you are ready to play for something, find an opponent in the lobby. You see the stake and the payout before you accept, and nothing leaves your balance until you say yes.