How to play Word Tiles

One board, five letters, everybody at once

The board is seven squares by seven with the premium squares printed on it, and the first word of the game goes through the middle. You hold five letters and nobody else can see them.

To play, choose the square your word starts on, say whether it runs across or down, and type it. The game works out which letters come off your rack and which were already on the board. Everybody does this at the same time, against one clock, and nothing waits for anybody.

Every word scores. One word goes down

When the round closes, every word played scores for whoever found it — you are all scoring against the same position, which is what makes comparing them fair. Then the highest-scoring word of the round is laid on the board, and that is the position everybody plays into next.

A word is three letters or more and has to be in the word list, and so does every word your play makes sideways. A premium square counts only for the play that first covers it. Using all five of your letters in one word is worth twenty on top of whatever it scored.

It stops when it says it will

Four, six or eight rounds, chosen before the deal. There is no bag to run out and no endgame, so nobody is counting tiles and nobody has to decide whether there is time for another one. The longest setting on offer finishes inside ten minutes.

After each round you are told what your own five letters could have made, which is the half of this game people argue about. Playing on your own is a real game rather than a practice mode: one machine knows only common words and will still beat you to the coloured squares, and another lays whatever makes three words at a time.

Questions people ask

Do we take turns?

No. Everybody plays into the same board at the same time and the round ends when the clock does, or sooner if everybody has decided. That is why a table of eight takes no longer than a table of two, and it is the change that makes a crossword tile game fit in a coffee break.

How long does it actually take?

Six rounds of forty-five seconds, with the reveals in between, is about five and a half minutes of play. The longest configuration on offer — eight rounds of a minute — is under ten. The round count is fixed before the deal, so the running time is a promise rather than an estimate.

What is the shortest word I can play?

Three letters. Our word list has no two-letter entries at all, so promising twos would mean refusing every one of them. Any word your play makes sideways has to be three letters and a real word too, which the board tells you before you commit.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Word Tiles?

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 Tiles?

1 to 8 — best with four. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Word Tiles 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.