LEADPIPE WORDGRID is a word-finding game that runs in your web browser. Trace through neighboring letters in the grid, in any direction, to form words. Each valid word is worth points. Accumulate as many points as possible before the timer runs out — or turn off the timer and just look for words at your leisure.
Start (
), pause (
), and resume (
) the game using the
controls below the grid. To quit a game, pause it and hit the smaller Stop
control (
) to the right below the grid.
On a device with a keyboard, you can type the space bar to pause or resume the game.
Form words by tracing letters on the grid: touch the first letter, then drag to the rest of the letters of the word. Lift your finger from the last letter to record the word.
You can go from one letter to any of its eight neighbors, straight or diagonal. But you can't use the same letter location more than once in a word.
As you trace letters, the word being formed appears below the grid. When the current preview string corresponds to a word, it shows you by changing color. If you arrive at a word that you've already recorded, it shows you that too.
With a keyboard, you can type letters in lieu of tracing them. Hit Enter to
record the word, or Escape to cancel what you've typed. If you type a word
that can't be traced on the grid, the previewed word will change color to show
you that.
Qs are special. They appear in the grid with an accompanying u, and they can
be used to form words with or without that U. When you trace a word through
a Q, you will see two words in the preview location, reflecting both
possibilities. For example, if you trace T R A N Qu I L through the grid, you
will see previewed two strings: TRANQIL (not a word) and TRANQUIL (is a
word). Before you get to the I L, you'll see TRANQ (is a word) and TRANQU
(not a word). When you lift your finger, any previewed string that is a word
will be recorded.
Each word is worth a set number of points depending on the number of letters in it.
| Length of word | Number of points |
|---|---|
| 3 or 4 | 1 |
| 5 | 2 |
| 6 | 3 |
| 7 | 5 |
| 8 | 11 |
| 9 or more |
You earn points by recording words before the timer expires. You may continue to find words after the timer expires, but won't be awarded any more points.
You may turn off the timer by clicking the eye icon below it. You'll still stop accumulating points after the set number of minutes.
Each word in Wordgrid's dictionary is assigned a category. The categories are levels 1 through 8, plus hacker, offensive, and profane. In general, the lower levels are more common words and the higher levels are more obscure. Hacker words are terms of art of the world of computers, while offensive and profane words are likely familiar but offensive and/or profane.
When you record a word, it appears next to the grid. You may tap the word for more information about it, including its category and the number of points it confers. There is also a link to look the word up.
On the left side of the grid, below the summary of how far you are through the puzzle, you can expand a list of your found words arranged by category. Each category containing any words in the puzzle appears, with stats pertaining to that category.
Wordgrid has small, medium, and large games:
| Game size | Grid size | Min word length | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 4⨉4 | 3 | 3 minutes |
| Medium | 5⨉5 | 4 | 3 minutes |
| Large | 6⨉6 | 5 | 4 minutes |
Each day a new game appears, in one of the sizes. Everybody gets the same daily game.
The history page shows all the games you've played recently, arranged by when you last played them. You can resume paused games, and see what words you found in any game.
After you quit a game, it's considered complete. When you expand a complete game, you can see the grid and all the words that appear within it, arranged by category. Each word that you found is marked, with the ones you found before the time ran out indicating how many points that word contributed to your total. Tap a word in the list to see a path through the grid that yields that word.
You start on the play page. To get to the history page, either complete a game (that is, quit it) or tap the left arrow above and to the left of the grid.
When you have completed a game, you can share it with others by entering the name you want to share as, and hitting enter. This will run the standard sharing logic of your device, or copy the share information to the clipboard. You can text or chat or email it to whomever you want to share with.
The URL included in the shared text indicates which words you found. When someone clicks that link, Wordgrid saves your words for that person to compare with their own set of words. If they share back to you, you will both be able to see what the other found.
You can click many people's share links for the same game, and you will see all of their found words.
Wordgrid uses Google Analytics 4(GA4) to track how and where the app is used. That is, it sends tiny messages describing the actions you have taken in the game to GA4, which aggregates this information into useful statistics it presents as charts and graphs.
Wordgrid has no idea who you are, what your interests are (apart from word games, apparently), or even how many different devices you play Wordgrid on. Each distinct device or browser profile appears to be a different person within GA4. GA4 translates your IP address into a rough geographic location, but that is all it does with IP addresses — it does not store them.
Wordgrid is a progressive web app (PWA). It runs entirely in the browser. There is no server component.
Wordgrid works offline. You do not need to be connected to the internet to use it. Its service worker caches all its files. It stores your game history in your browser's IndexedDB.
Wordgrid uses WebAssembly (Wasm) for the web worker that generates grids and finds all the words they contain. This portion is written in Rust and compiled to Wasm using wasm-pack.
Wordgrid generates grids using the distribution of letters in its dictionary. It chooses a letter for each location independently, using that distribution. Only then does it search for words. Using the full letter distribution to generate the grid has the effect of making common letters appear much more often, and rare letters much less often, than in the classic dice-based games, which must quantize those distributions. This in turn makes the typical grid contain more and rarer words. A happy side effect of doing the simplest thing possible.
For the UI, Wordgrid uses Lit in TypeScript. Lit makes it easy to write web components.
Wordgrid's list of words derives from the excellent
SCOWL. I use all the -word files
through level 80, plus the extra miscellaneous naughty and hacker words. I
relabel the numerical levels to just the first digit (so a level 80 SCOWL word
becomes a level 8 Wordgrid word).
I deduplicate words to the higher level: so if a word appears in a level 3 and a level 8 list, I categorize it as level 8. For this deduplication step, I treat the hacker category as less than level 1, and the offensive and profane levels as higher than level 8. This has the effect that Wordgrid categorizes a word "hacker" only if it doesn't also appear in a different category; and that "profane" and "offensive" words always retain all the words assigned to them.
Wordgrid descends from Boggle™️, and from a now defunct Android app called WordzUp.
SCOWL (the source of Wordgrid's dictionary) is marked with the following copyright and permission notice:
Copyright 2000-2018 by Kevin Atkinson
Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell these word lists, the associated scripts, the output created from the scripts, and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no representations about the suitability of this array for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
MDN is my go-to source for everything Web. I visit MDN many times every day.
QP-Trie is the screamingly fast trie implementation that lets Wordgrid search a letter grid for all possible words in a heartbeat. Rand_pcg and rand_seeder are the building blocks for random number generation that allows all instances of Wordgrid to produce the same set of puzzles each day. Wasm-bindgen is the tool that bridges the gap between Rust-Wasm code and the JavaScript that powers the UI.
On the JavaScript/TypeScript side, idb is fantastic at making IndexedDB practical to use. Lit makes writing web components super simple and fun.
Wordgrid uses three fonts, all hosted on the invaluable Fontsource.
- All its icons are from the Material Icons font by Google.
- The letters in the grid are rendered in Merriweather
Sans.
- MerriweatherSans[wght].ttf: Copyright 2019 The Merriweather Project Authors (https://github.com/SorkinType/Merriweather-Sans)
- All the rest of the app is in Prompt.
- Prompt-[wght].ttf: Copyright (c) 2015, Cadson Demak ([email protected])