How to Play the Wend Game
Wend is a word-path puzzle: a grid where hidden words snake between neighboring letters, bending around walls. This guide covers the rules, the controls, and the strategy that makes hard boards fall apart.
The board
A Wend puzzle is a square grid. A handful of cells are gray walls — they hold no letter and can never be part of a word. Every remaining open cell holds exactly one letter. The number of walls and words depends on the grid size: the daily 5×5 has four words and seven walls, while the 10×10 packs in ten longer words across a roomier grid.
The one rule that matters
Each hidden word is spelled along a path. A path moves one step at a time between orthogonally adjacent cells — up, down, left, or right, never diagonally. It bends around walls and it never visits the same cell twice. The key idea that makes Wend a puzzle rather than a word search: the open cells are exactly partitioned by the words. That means every single open tile belongs to one and only one word. Nothing is left over, and nothing is shared. Solve the board and you have carved the whole open area into neat, connected word-shaped pieces.
Tracing a word
There are two ways to enter a word, and both work on touchscreens and with a mouse:
- Press and drag. Put your finger or pointer on the first tile and drag across connected tiles. The trace follows your movement between adjacent cells. Drag back over the previous tile to undo a step. Release to submit.
- Tap to step. Tap a tile to start, then tap each adjacent tile in turn to extend the path. Tapping the current end tile again submits the trace. Tapping a tile that is not adjacent clears the current trace so you can start over.
When your finished trace matches a hidden word's path — forward or backward, it does not matter which end you start from — the word locks in and its tiles take on a distinct color, with a line drawn through the path. If the trace does not match any unsolved word, it gives a quick shake and clears, and nothing is lost.
Hints, undo, and reset
Three controls sit above every board. Hint reveals the next letter of one unsolved word and rings that tile in gold; the first tap starts a word, and each further tap extends the same word until it is solved, so hints show you exactly where a path begins and which way it heads. Hints are unlimited, though they count toward your stats. Undo removes the most recently locked word, which is handy when a word you placed blocks the rest of the grid. Reset clears every locked word so you can start the board fresh.
Winning and sharing
You win the moment every open tile is locked into a word. The board shows your finish time, how many hints you used, and your current daily streak — completing any daily size keeps the streak alive for that day. A share button copies a compact, spoiler-free emoji grid of your result to the clipboard, so you can post it without revealing the answers.
Strategy tips
These are the quick pointers. For a deeper walkthrough of the solving techniques — anchor tiles, corner reasoning, forced corridors, and length elimination — read the full Wend strategy guide.
Start in the corners and dead-ends
A tile with only one open neighbor must be the end of a word, so its path is forced to begin there. Corners and cells boxed in by walls are the easiest places to anchor a word and work inward.
Count the open tiles
Every open tile belongs to exactly one word, and the words have set lengths. If a small pocket of the board has, say, four open tiles walled off from the rest, one word must fit that pocket exactly.
Let walls do the work
Walls force paths to bend. When a corridor of open tiles is only one cell wide, the word has no choice but to follow it. Trace those forced corridors first to shrink the puzzle.
Use hints to reveal a path's head
A hint lights up the next letter of one unsolved word and rings it in gold. Because the ring shows where a word begins, it tells you which direction the path is heading — often enough to finish it yourself.
Undo instead of resetting
If a locked word turns out to block the rest of the grid, undo just that word rather than clearing the whole board. It removes the most recent word so you can try a different route.
Trace either direction
A word is accepted whether you trace it forward or backward. If a path is easier to follow from its far end, start there — the game checks both directions.
Ready to play? Start with today's 5×5, warm up with the puzzle library, or revisit the archive. Want to solve faster? See the strategy guide.