Word Crossword: Connect Puzzle

A wheel of letters at the bottom, a small crossword above it. Swipe across the
letters to spell a word. If it belongs on the grid it drops into place. Fill
every square and the level is done.

THE SAME LETTERS, OVER AND OVER

That is the whole game. MEAT, MATE, TAME, TEAM are one bag of four letters read
four ways, and a seven-letter wheel hides eight or nine words in the same
trick. You are not looking for new letters. You are re-ordering the ones you can
already see.

THE GRID NEVER HOLDS A WORD IT WILL NOT ACCEPT

The worst moment in a crossword game is reading a word off the board and being
told it is not there. Every one of the 900 grids is re-read by a separate
checker that scans the finished board and lists what it actually spells, in both
directions, and refuses the level unless that list is exactly the level's own
words. If you can read it, it counts.

EXTRA WORDS PAY

The wheel almost always spells more than the grid holds. Find one of those and
it pays coins -- once each, for ever, and no list tells you what they are. Every
board has at least two and a typical one has ten.

The dictionary is drawn from the three commonest bands of a public English word
list, so what it knows are words people know: RADISH, COYOTE, TOFFEE, VERANDA,
GEYSER, RHUBARB. Not GRAAL, YEEDS or SPITTEN. Being paid for a word nobody has
heard of does not feel clever, it feels like the game is making things up.

SEVEN SECTIONS, 900 LEVELS

Warm Up, Easy, Steady, Harder, Tricky, Tough, Expert.

The wheel grows from four letters to seven across them, and that is the real
difficulty: four letters have a few dozen orderings and seven have thirteen
thousand. Word counts grow too, from four a board to nine or ten. Sections open
as you play, counted anywhere, so a board you cannot finish never blocks you.

STUCK IS NOT A DEAD END

• SHUFFLE re-orders the wheel, free, as often as you like. It is the move you
will actually make, and it costs nothing because a game where being stuck
costs money is a paywall.
• Nothing you do can make a level unwinnable. Every move only ever adds.
• Restart is in the menu and is always free.

A PUZZLE OF THE DAY, AND A RUN TO KEEP

One board a day, the same for everybody, chosen by the date. Solve it and your
streak goes up. Miss a day and you can put the run back, but you still have to
play today's puzzle.

And TIME ATTACK, the one part of this game with a clock: two minutes to start,
more for every word you find, harder boards as you go, and your best run is the
only score kept.

BUILT TO BE READ

• An empty square is a hole in the board, not a box drawn on it, so the first
word you land is the only bright thing on the screen.
• The letters on the wheel are big enough to read with your hand over half of
it, and the discs never sit closer together than a fingertip.
• Checked at 320dp, which is the smallest phone still sold, on the largest board
in the game.

NO NONSENSE

• Levels, dailies, time-attack boards and extra words pay coins, and coins buy
eight board looks. They never buy help.
• A short advert may play when you leave a finished level, never mid-level and
never in your first few. Every other advert is one you chose to watch, and its
button says AD first. No banners.
• Nothing is locked behind a paywall.
• No account, no sign-up, no email address.
• All 900 puzzles are inside the app, so it plays with no signal.
• Progress stays on your device. The app sends anonymous gameplay counts so we
can tell whether it is being played; never your name, your advertising ID or
your location, because it never asks for any of them.

Word crossword, word connect, word link, letter wheel puzzle -- whatever you
call it, this is the one that does not argue with a word you can plainly read.

Free. Start with Warm Up.