How to play Word Run

One board and one tray, between all of you

The board is five squares by five, empty at the start of every level, with a star in the middle and twelve coloured squares around it that multiply a letter or a whole word. Under it is a tray of seven letters that belongs to the table rather than to anybody in it.

You lay a word by picking a square, saying whether it runs across or down, and typing it. Anybody may lay the next one — there is no turn order, no waiting and no hand of your own. Three to five letters, the first word of a level goes through the star, and everything after it has to touch what is already down.

A number to beat, and four goes to beat it

Every level sets a score. The first wants thirty, which is one decent word; the last wants three hundred and forty, which is not reachable by finding good words and is meant not to be. You get four words a level, and the level ends the moment the score goes past the number.

Every word you did not need is a coin, so the decision at every single word is the same one: take the safe eleven now, or spend another go hunting for the forty on the corner. That question is the whole game, and it is why the level does not simply run all four words out and pay on the total.

If nobody finds anything in thirty seconds the letters go back and you are down a go — which is the trade a stuck table would have made anyway. The clock is on the go and never on the level, so a long argument costs you a word rather than the run.

Spend the winnings

Between levels there is a counter with three relics on it and whatever coins the run has earned. Each relic is one sentence long and there are only seven of them in the whole game, on purpose: a shelf of ninety modifiers is a lookup exercise rather than a game, and it is won by whoever has read a wiki.

They do different kinds of thing rather than different amounts of the same thing — more for each vowel, double for the first word of a level, a bonus for a five, an extra letter in the tray, an extra go each level, coloured squares that never stop paying, and two more coins a level. A run pays for about three of them.

Two of the seven multiply rather than add, and the last level is set at the number those two land on together. That is the shape of the run: the early levels are about finding words, and the late ones are about what you bought while you were doing it.

What counts as a word

The same list every word game here uses — 78,658 entries from ENABLE, cut at a frequency floor and filtered for a screen at work — so a word that scores in one game on this shelf scores in all of them.

Three letters at least. The list holds no two-letter entries at all, so a game that promised twos would refuse every one of them; and any word your play makes sideways has to be three letters and a real word too. When something will not go down the board says why, to everybody: which letter the tray has not got, or that the board would spell CRATES rather than the CRATE you typed. That sentence is the most useful thing the game says, which is why the whole table gets it rather than only whoever typed it.

Questions people ask

Do I have to be good at word games?

Less than you would think, and less the more of you there are. Three to five letters on a board five squares wide is a much smaller search than a crossword board, the letters are in front of everybody, and anybody may say the word — so the person who is good at anagrams is an asset to the table rather than somebody the rest of you lose to. The first two levels fall to one ordinary word each.

Can I play it on my own?

Yes, and it is the shape it was designed in: a run is a solitaire, and the multiplayer is three other people shouting at it. Nothing changes — the same board, the same letters, the same six numbers — because nothing in the game belongs to a particular person. What it has not got is a machine to play against, and it is not going to get one: anything that could take a chair here would be searching a board for the best word, which is the entire game.

Is somebody going to win?

No, and that is not an omission. There is one board, one set of letters and one number, so a level falls for everybody at the table at once and the result is how far the run got. Ranking the table by who typed the most would measure who types fastest and would quietly turn a game about agreeing on a word into a race for the tray. The final screen does say who found what, because a table absolutely wants to know who spotted the big one — but that is a story rather than a standing.

What happens if we get stuck with letters that will not go anywhere?

Throw them back. It costs one of your four goes and you get seven new ones, which is a real decision rather than a free reset — and the thirty-second clock does exactly the same thing for you if nobody has said anything. Every tray the game deals is checked before it comes out: if there is no three-letter word in it at all, it is thrown away and redrawn before anybody sees it.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Word Run?

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 Word Run?

1 to 4 — best with three. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Word Run take?

About 12 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.