Word Grid

Build interlocking words on a 15×15 board, crossword style. Every tile has a point value, and the board is scattered with premium squares that multiply letters and whole words. The player with the most points when the tiles run out wins.

2 to 4 players.

The bag is shuffled and every player draws 7 tiles. Player 1 goes first, and play proceeds in seat order. The first player alternates between games: Player 1 opens the first game, Player 2 the next, and so on round the table.

On your turn you do exactly one of three things.

Tap a tile on your rack, then tap an empty square to place it. Place as many tiles as you like before committing — nothing is final until you press Submit.

A legal play must satisfy all of these:

The board shows you where a tile may go rather than letting you place one anywhere: only the squares that could still belong to a legal play are offered and ringed. Before your first tile of the turn that means the star's row and column at the opening, and afterwards any square within a rack's length of the letters already down, along its row or column — a rack holds seven tiles, so nothing further away could be part of a play anyway. Once a tile is down the play is committed to a line, so from then on only that row or column is offered.

You can lay a word out in whatever order you like, including plain reading order: the squares your word needs are all on offer from the start, not just the one that happens to touch the board.

With tiles still in the bag, tap rack tiles to set them aside, then press Swap. They go back into the bag, it is reshuffled, and you draw the same number of replacements. This ends your turn and scores nothing. Cancel puts the set-aside tiles back on your rack.

You cannot exchange more tiles than the bag holds, so once the bag is empty exchanging is closed.

Press Pass to do nothing. It scores nothing and ends your turn.

A blank is a wildcard. When you place one, you are asked which letter it stands for, and you cannot place another tile or submit until you say. From then on it spells that letter for the rest of the game — and it is always worth 0 points, even on a double-letter square. It keeps its violet tint on the board so everyone can see the word contains a wildcard.

Recalling a declared blank turns it back into a blank, so you are free to change your mind before you submit.

Each word the play forms is scored, then the totals are added together.

For a single word:

A premium square pays once, on the turn a tile first covers it. Later words running through that tile score it at face value.

When a play forms more than one word, a multiplier on a newly covered square applies to every word that square belongs to.

Placing all 7 tiles from your rack in a single play scores an extra 50 points.

After a play, you draw back up to 7 tiles, as far as the bag allows.

The game ends in one of two ways:

The highest final score wins. An exact tie is a draw.

Words are checked against the game's built-in English word list, which covers 2 to 10 letters.

Allowed: ordinary nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, plurals, and normal verb tenses.

Not allowed: proper names, abbreviations, contractions, hyphenated words, and foreign words that are not part of ordinary English.

Two practical consequences worth knowing:

Because the list is a common-English extract rather than a full tournament lexicon, a few dictionary-legal rarities will not be accepted. Submit is disabled rather than penalised, so an unrecognised word costs you nothing but a rethink.