Waffle Words

Controls

Mouse on a computer, touch on a phone or tablet. Some games also take the arrow keys or the letter keys, and the game will say so when it starts.

Take it with you

Scan to open Waffle Words on your phone.

Our free daily · new every day Findish A word search with a new theme every day Play

Waffle Words is a word hunt with a stopwatch attached. A grid of letters, a set of words hidden inside it, and a clock that does not stop while you think.

The timer is the whole design. Without it this is a gentle puzzle. With it, the moment where you have found four words and cannot see the fifth becomes genuinely uncomfortable, which is the point.

How to play Waffle Words

Look over the grid for a word you recognise.
Select its first letter and drag straight through the rest of it.
Release to lock the word in. It is struck off and stays marked in the grid.
The line has to be straight. Words do not bend partway through.
Clear every word before the timer expires.

Your time is recorded, so a board you have already solved is worth replaying. The second run through a familiar grid is a different exercise entirely, closer to recall than to searching.

Tips and strategy

Give yourself ten seconds at the start to read the grid without trying to solve it. Your eye will flag two or three words on its own.
Scan by column once you have taken the easy horizontals. Vertical words are where most of the lost time goes.
Uncommon letters are anchors. Find the Z or the K first and read outwards from it in all directions.
When you stall, turn your attention to the letters you have not used yet rather than rereading the ones you have. Solved words draw the eye back to the same region over and over.
Do not fight one word to the end. Leave it, clear two others, and the crossings will usually hand it to you.

For the same hunt without the clock, the word search puzzles let you take as long as you like.