How to play Nine Letters

The tiles come out all at once

Nine of them, rather than being chosen one at a time. The choosing is good television and dead air on a call — half a minute in which one person plays and everybody else watches a letter appear.

What is kept is what the ritual produced: the vowel count varies, the tiles are drawn from the programme's real piles, and every rack is checked before it is dealt so that none of them is a dud.

You hold exactly one word

You can improve it right up to the buzzer, and you can retreat to a shorter one you are surer of. That is a real decision rather than a mercy: the reveal shows the whole climb, so throwing away a good six at twenty-four seconds is visible to the table.

Tap the letters or type them — both are the same move. A tile you have used turns face down, so you cannot spend the same T twice.

You are told how long, and never what

While the clock runs you know the length of everybody else's word and nothing else. That is the programme's own rule, and it is pressure without being an answer: you cannot type a seven because you were told one exists.

The words themselves arrive together, at the buzzer, for everybody at once. Score is the length of your word — and all nine tiles is worth eighteen, which happens perhaps one rack in forty.

Questions people ask

What happens if two of us find the same word?

You both score it. That is the difference between this and The Shake, where a duplicate is struck off both lists — here you are racing length rather than each other's imagination, which makes it the gentler of the two at a mixed table.

Can I play Nine Letters on my own?

Yes, and it is one of the three games that feed the daily puzzle, so there is a fresh rack every day. The bots have vocabularies rather than difficulty settings: the Chancer can see a five perfectly well, will not write it down, and ends most racks with nothing before taking one outright.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Nine Letters?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Nine Letters?

1 to 12 — best with five, and a chancer to lose to. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Nine Letters take?

About 10 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.