Wordscapes

How to play Wordscapes

• The letters sit in a ring below the grid.
• Press and drag through them to spell a word. They do not have to be adjacent in the ring.
• A word that belongs in the grid drops into place and stays.
• Fill every slot in the grid to finish the level and unlock the next.
• Stuck levels can be opened with the lightbulb hint, paid for with coins.

Reading the grid before you guess

The grid is a hint system that costs nothing. Before spelling anything, count the slots and note their lengths.

Three letters given and a grid asking for four words means every combination is in play. Six letters and a grid asking for eight words means the long slot uses everything and the short ones are its fragments. Those are different puzzles and they want different opening moves.

Coins and hints

Coins come from finishing levels and from bonus words, and they pay for the lightbulb.

The mistake almost everyone makes is spending coins in the first fifty levels, where the answers are findable with patience, and then arriving at level three hundred with nothing banked. Early levels are where you earn, not where you spend.

Bonus words

Any real word you spell that is not in the grid counts as a bonus word and pays coins. It does not fill a slot and it does not slow you down.

That makes guessing free. If a string of letters looks like it might be a word, spell it. The worst outcome is nothing, and the common outcome is a few coins towards a hint you will need later.

Tips and strategy

Openings

• Solve the longest slot first when you can. It almost always uses every letter in the ring, and once it is in, the shorter words are built from pieces you can now see written down.
• If the long word will not come, take the three letter slots. They cost nothing and they hand you crossing letters that narrow everything else.
• Read the ring in a circle and then out of order. The ring arrangement is arbitrary and your eye will lock onto it if you let it.

Working the endings

• Run S, ED, ER, ING and LY through every word you have already placed. On a six letter ring this single habit usually finds two or three more slots.
• Watch for a doubled letter in the ring. Two of the same letter almost always means the answer uses both, which rules out most of what you were considering.
• Vowel count decides the shape. One vowel in six letters means a consonant heavy word with a common ending, not an exotic one.

When a level will not move

• Spell nonsense deliberately. Not random letters, but plausible strings. Bonus words pay and the act of trying combinations breaks the fixation on the arrangement you have been staring at.
• Look at the crossing letters already placed in the grid. A slot with a fixed third letter is a much smaller problem than an empty one.
• Come back to it. There is no clock and no penalty, and a level that is impossible at eleven at night is often obvious the next morning.

Where rounds are lost

• Spending coins early. Hints are worth far more at level three hundred than at level thirty.
• Ignoring the slot lengths and treating the ring as an open word hunt.
• Playing long sessions. Word recall drops noticeably after ten or fifteen minutes, and this is a game designed for short visits.