How to Play

Worduel

1. Each player secretly chooses a valid five-letter word.
2. Take turns guessing the opponent's word.
3. The score is how many letters the words share; positions do not matter.
4. Guess the exact word to win. Sharing every letter is not enough — STEER vs TREES scores 5 and still misses.
5. The first exact guess ends the match. There is no levelling guess afterwards, so cracking the word wins it outright.
6. The daily Worduel is a duel with WordBot on the same word for everyone: lock in your own secret, race WordBot to crack its word, and keep your streak going. There is no clock.

An isogram has no repeated letters, such as BRICK. Isograms can be easier to reason about, but they are not required here.

Draw & Guess

1. A room seats up to 8. Everyone takes turns at the canvas, once or more per game, and people can join a game already in play.
2. The drawer picks one of three words and has 60, 80 or 100 seconds, as the room was set up, to draw it: brush, eraser, paint bucket, twenty colours.
3. Everyone else types guesses into the chat. Wrong guesses are shown to the room; a correct one is announced but never shown. Letters of the word appear as the clock runs down.
4. The sooner you guess, and the fewer people guessed before you, the more you score. The drawer scores for how quickly and how widely the room named the picture. Highest total wins.

Werewolf

1. A village seats 5 to 8. One player is a werewolf (two at eight), one is the seer, one is the doctor, and the rest are villagers. Only you see your own role; wolves also see each other.
2. At night the wolves choose someone to kill, the seer learns whether one player is a wolf, and the doctor guards one player, never the same one two nights running. Only the wolves can talk at night.
3. At dawn the village learns who died and what they were. By day everyone talks in the chat and votes; the player with the most votes, if more than any other and more than the votes for nobody, is hanged and their role shown.
4. The village wins when every wolf is dead. The wolves win once they are as many as everyone else alive. The dead can watch every role and talk among themselves.

Wordweave

1. Build a word of at least four letters from your seven-letter stream.
2. The opening word must cross the center heart; later words must join the weave.
3. Play across, down, or on the Drift diagonal. Other lines of two or three letters are free touches; cross-words of four or more letters must be in the lexicon and score their letter values.
4. Letters come from a shared bag of 95. If nothing fits, swap the whole stream while the bag holds seven, or pass. Either spends the turn and scores nothing.
5. Longer and rarer-letter words score more. The high score wins after 18 turns, 4 scoreless turns in a row, or the bag and a player's stream run dry.
6. Live turns last two minutes. One expired turn passes; letting two of your own turns expire in a row forfeits the weave. Practice has no clock.

Ghost variants

Matches and fairness

• Practice against WordBot is free and never changes ratings.
• Private games are accessible only through their invitation link.
• Rematches require both players and never copy the old wager.
• Live Worduel turns allow five minutes; Ghost turns allow two minutes. Worduel and Ghost practice, including the daily, have no clock.
• Running out of time in a live Worduel or Ghost match awards the match to your opponent.
• A live Worduel pair has three minutes to lock in secret words. Whoever hasn’t chosen by then forfeits; if neither has, the match is called off and stakes are returned.
• Guests can play everything; only their results stay off the leaderboard.

Pinpoint

1. You are dropped on a street somewhere in the world. Look around, and move along the road if the rules allow: which side traffic keeps to, the road lines, the signs, the plates, the trees and where the sun sits all give the country away.
2. Pin the map and press Guess. Distance sets the score, up to 5,000 points, on the same curve GeoGuessr uses.
3. Classic is five rounds for the best total. Duel starts both players on 6,000 health; each round the lower score loses the difference, multiplied from round five, and the first pin gives the other player 15 seconds to follow.
4. Play solo, against WordBot, or live against a friend or a stranger. Live rounds always have a clock; a missing pin scores zero.

Trivia

1. Read the clue, then lock one of the four responses. A locked answer cannot be changed.
2. A correct response is worth the clue's dollar value; a wrong one scores nothing and costs nothing.
3. Live duels allow 20 seconds to answer, with up to 50% extra for speed. A missing answer scores zero.
4. Neither answer is revealed until both players have locked, so nobody can follow the other.
5. Both players continue before the next clue; a live duel also advances after 20 seconds of review. The higher total after the last clue wins.
6. Play solo at your own pace, duel WordBot at three difficulty levels, or challenge a friend on a private link.

Word puzzles

Original puzzles on the Words shelf, each with a daily and practice games, and a timed duel where it fits.

• Rackrace Seven tiles; fill lengths 3–7. The seven-letter word spends the whole rack.
• Lattice A 4×4 or 5×5 grid. Walk between neighbouring tiles to spell words of three or more letters.
• Tangle Four scrambled words; circled letters spell a trivia punchline.
• Ink Mini is a 5×5 word square with no black squares. Midi is 9×9 and Ink itself is a 21×21 Sunday-size themed grid, both on American crossword rules. Every grid and clue is original.
• Headings One letter and a dozen trivia headings. Unique answers score; shared ones do not.
• Kindred Twelve words, four groups of three. Three wrong guesses and the game is over.
• Motif A 6×6 grid of letters. Trace the theme words through it (up, down and sideways, never diagonally); the letters left over, read in order, name the theme.
• Perimeter Sixteen letters around a frame, four to a side. Each letter of a word must come from a different side than the one before; a new word may start anywhere. Use every letter.
• Cipher A trivia clue in simple substitution.
• Finder A themed word search.
• Rungs Change one letter at a time from the start word to the finish.
• Ziggurat A word pyramid. Each row is the row above plus one letter, rearranged. Top and bottom are given; fill in the middle.

Board tables

Each table shows its objective, pace, current player, and legal actions. Select a piece or space first; highlighted destinations are the moves you can make. Each game's own rules cover its scoring and how it ends.

Night Deck

Pick a table by family, and use Practice for a first hand with nothing at stake. The Cabinet family holds the deck games that run in the browser -- Triad Tactics and the two patience decks. The table always shows whose turn it is and what you can do; hover or focus a greyed-out action to see why it's off.

Emerald Lounge

Emeralds are play points with no cash value. Choose a wager, review the published odds, then play one short round. Power Pair is a memory game; Pixel Slots is chance; Island Shuffle asks you to pick one of three hiding places.

Arena & Neon Cabinet

Arena supports keyboard, touch, and gamepads; build damage and knock your rival off the stage three times. Neon Cabinet contains short head-to-head and co-op games, with the objective and mode shown on each cabinet before matchmaking. Every cabinet except Wordstrike and the CHIP-8 ROM Vault also plays on a controller: Xbox, PlayStation and Switch pads, 8BitDo in any mode, and SNES-style USB pads such as iNNEXT — once one is connected, the legend under a cabinet shows what each button does. Card and board games live in Night Deck and the board tables.