Lexicove: Spell, Clear, Solve

One board a day. The same letters for everyone, thirty words to spend, and a streak to keep. No clock, no account, nothing to buy. Take your time. Choose your words.

One board a day. The same letters for every player in the world, and thirty words to spend on them. Trace a word through touching tiles and it clears; the board falls in to fill the gap, and your count drops by one.

Thirty is fewer than it sounds. Every word you spell is a word you no longer have, so an easy three-letter word is never free — it costs one of the plays you needed to beat the score you were chasing. That question is the game, and nothing else on the App Store asks it.

THE DAILY POOL

One board, seeded from the date, identical for everyone who opens it, and replaced at the same moment everywhere. Finish it and the streak grows by one. Miss one and it is still there: every board back to the first is in the archive, and playing it fills the day in and joins the streak up again. Because the letters are the same for every player, the only variable is which words you found — and in what order you were willing to spend them.

WHO SPENT THEM BETTER

Send the day's result to anyone: your score, your best word, and a link that opens that same board on their phone. Same letters, same thirty words, and no account on either end — so the only thing left to compare is what the two of you did with them. Game Center keeps a leaderboard for the day, for when you want the whole field rather than one friend.

BUILD THE SWELL

Long words chain. Each one you find that holds the chain lifts a multiplier that applies to everything after it, and a short word breaks it — which is most of the distance between your score and the one somebody sent you. Pull from the bottom rows for a Deep Pull bonus; drop a tile far enough and the collapse pays a Cascade. Sea gems raise whatever word they land in.

WHEN ONE BOARD IS NOT ENOUGH

Journey is there for the days the Daily does not last. Score carries from level 1 and the targets climb; miss one and the run ends there, with a record of how far you got. Words you did not need are paid out as points, so finishing a level early is worth something. Same game, brakes off.

HELP HAS A PRICE

Shuffle the board or ask for a hint whenever you like — both cost points, charged against the board you are playing. So the question is never whether you can have help. It is whether the word you cannot find is worth what being shown it costs.

WHAT IS NOT IN HERE

No timer. No account, no sign-up, no email. No energy meter, no lives, and no notifications nagging you back — the streak is between you and the calendar. It works on a plane.

125,314 words, from the public-domain ENABLE word list. Game Center leaderboards for today's Daily Pool, your best run and your deepest level. Full VoiceOver and Dynamic Type support, and every tile that matters is distinguished by shape and texture as well as colour.

Free, and complete. There is nothing to buy.