About Fun Wordsearch

A round is a square grid and a list of words. Every word in the list is somewhere in the grid, running in one of eight directions — left, right, up, down, or any of the four diagonals — and words cross where they share a letter. Everything else is random filler.

Three difficulties change how much grid the words have to hide in: 12 by 12, 18 by 18, or 24 by 24. Each game has its own word list, which is what changes from one to the next; the games are grouped by category and listed in full, word for word, on the Puzzles page.

A timer runs while you play, hints can be switched on or off before the round starts, and when the last word falls you are shown the time it took.

1. Press New Game.
2. Choose Single Player, or one of the two multiplayer modes.
3. Pick a difficulty and a word category, and decide whether you want hints.
4. Press Start Game.

With a mouse or a finger

Press on the first letter of a word and release on the last one. You can also tap the first letter and then tap the last, without dragging, if that is easier.

With a keyboard

Tab to the grid and move around it with the arrow keys; Home and End jump to the ends of a row. Enter or Space marks the first letter of a word, and pressing either again on the last letter completes the selection. Esc abandons a selection you have started.

Words you find are struck through in the list and stay marked in the grid. If hints are on, the hint button will point you at a word you have not found yet.

One player hosts a room and gets a code — two adjectives, a noun and four digits, like petite-zealous-cheddar-2052. Everyone else joins with that code, or with the join link the host can copy in one press. When the host starts the round, a countdown runs on every screen and everyone gets the same grid at the same moment.

There are two ways to play it. In Time Attack everyone solves the whole puzzle and the first to finish wins. In Competitive the first player to find a word takes it away from everybody else, and the most words wins.

The browsers connect to each other directly rather than through a game server, using PeerJS to introduce them. Multiplayer walks through hosting and joining step by step.

The game is built to WCAG 2.2 AA. The grid is fully playable from the keyboard, every state that is shown in colour is also shown some other way, text can be resized and respaced without anything being clipped, and animation stops for anyone whose system asks for reduced motion. An automated accessibility suite runs against both the markup and the stylesheets on every change.

Testing with actual screen readers is still to come. Structural correctness and a good screen reader experience are not the same thing, and it would be overstating things to claim the second.

Plain JavaScript, jQuery and Bootstrap 5, served as static files — no backend, no framework and no build step. Multiplayer is peer-to-peer over PeerJS. The whole thing is a folder of HTML, CSS and JavaScript that a web server hands over unchanged.