Multiplayer

1. Open the game and press New Game.
2. Pick Competitive or Time Attack down the left of the dialog.
3. Leave Room Code blank and one is generated for you, or type your own in the form word-word-word-number — for example petite-zealous-cheddar-2052.
4. Choose a difficulty and a word category, then press Start Game.
5. You land on a waiting screen showing your room code. The button beside it copies a join link — a normal web address that drops whoever opens it straight into your room.
6. Send the code or the link to the people you want in the game. Players appear in the list as they connect.
7. Press Start Game when everyone is in. A five-second countdown runs on every screen, and then everybody gets the same grid at the same moment.

With a link

Open it. The page reads the room out of the address and joins straight away — there is nothing to type and nothing to confirm. You then wait on the host, and the round starts for you when it starts for everyone.

With a code

Open the game, press Join Game, paste the code and press Join. Codes are lowercase, and anything you paste is trimmed and lowercased for you, so a code copied out of a chat message with a stray space still works.

Time Attack

Everyone races the same grid for the same words. Finding a word takes it off your list and nobody else's, so every player has the whole puzzle to solve. First to find them all wins, and the finishing times are shown side by side at the end.

Competitive

The first player to find a word takes it. It is struck off everyone else's list and marked on their grid, so the puzzle shrinks as the round goes on. Whoever has claimed the most words when the grid is cleared wins.

A room code is two adjectives, a noun and a four-digit number, joined by hyphens: petite-zealous-cheddar-2052. The words are drawn at random from two bundled 512-word lists, which is what makes a code hard to land on by chance rather than merely hard to remember.

The code is how a room is found, so anyone holding it can join. Share it with the people you want in the game.

Your address bar holds the room you are in, so reloading the page puts you back into the same round with your score intact. A refresh and a shared join link are the same thing to the game.

When the host leaves the game, another player takes over hosting and the room keeps the code it started with. Nobody has to swap links or start again.

• A current browser. There is nothing to install and no account to make.
• Everyone playing has to be online at the same time — a room only exists while somebody is in it.
• One person to host, and the code or link in the hands of everyone else.