What is Wend?
Wend is a word puzzle played on a small grid of letters. A handful of words are hidden in the grid, and you find them by tracing a path from letter to letter. The twist is that Wend is also a jigsaw: the words fit together so that every open tile is used by exactly one word. When the last word is placed, the whole board is covered and the puzzle is solved.
Wend launched as one of LinkedIn's daily games in June 2026. This site is an independent, free place to play it: today's daily Wend, an endless supply of unlimited boards, and a full archive of past puzzles, with no sign-in. If you want the background on the game itself, read What is Wend?
The four rules
You can learn Wend in one minute. There are only four rules, and the first two are enough to start tracing.
1 · Find every hidden word
Each board hides four to eight words. You are not told what they are, only how long they are: the empty rows under the grid show one blank tile per letter, sorted from shortest to longest. The shortest word is three letters and the longest is one more than the board width, so up to six letters on a 5×5, seven on a 6×6, eight on a 7×7 and nine on an 8×8.
2 · Trace adjacent letters
A word is a path. Each step goes to the tile directly above, below, left or right of the previous letter. Never diagonally, never skipping a tile, and never through a gray wall. Words are free to bend as often as they like, which is what makes them hard to see at a glance.
3 · Use every tile exactly once
No two words can share a tile, and no open tile can be left over. Add up the lengths of all the words and you get exactly the number of open tiles on the board. That single fact is the heart of the puzzle: a word is not just “a word you can spell”, it is the word that belongs on those tiles, leaving a shape the other words can still fill.
4 · Drag to trace, release to submit
Press on the first letter, drag through the tiles in order and let go. If the trace is one of the hidden words on its correct path, it locks in with its own color and the matching length row fills in. If not, the tiles flash red and clear so you can try again. Drag back over the previous tile mid-trace to erase a step.
Reading the board
Walls
Gray tiles are walls. They are fixed before you start and words can never pass through them. Walls are not decoration: they carve the grid into corridors and pockets, and those shapes are what force each word onto one path. A corridor one tile wide has to carry a single word straight through it. A tile boxed in on three sides can only be a word's first or last letter. Every Wend board is built so that its walls leave exactly one way to fit all the words together, and every board on this site is checked by computer to confirm that.
Word lengths
The blank rows beneath the grid are your only clue to what the words are. Count them before you trace anything. If the rows show 3, 5, 5 and 6, you know the board holds nineteen open tiles split exactly that way. As you place words their rows fill in with the letters, in the same color as the band on the board, so you can always see what is left to find.
Colors
Each word has its own color band, in length order: emerald for the shortest, then blue, amber, violet, rose and cyan. The band follows the exact path you traced, so a long word that snakes around a wall reads as one connected ribbon. Your in-progress trace is gray until you release.
Board sizes
Wend comes in four grid sizes. The daily puzzle climbs from a 6×6 on Monday to an 8×8 at the weekend; in Unlimited you can pin one size or let the picker choose.
| Grid | Words | Longest word | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5×5 | 3–4 | Up to 7 letters | Unlimited only. A two-minute warm-up where corners and short corridors do most of the work. |
| 6×6 | 4–5 | Up to 9 letters | Monday and Tuesday dailies. Expect one long word that bends two or three times. |
| 7×7 | 5–6 | Up to 11 letters | Midweek dailies. Walls form real rooms and you plan the whole board. |
| 8×8 | 5–7 | Up to 11 letters | Weekend dailies. The longest solve, with ten- and eleven-letter words snaking between the rooms. |
A worked example
Here is a real 5×5 board from our pool, solved the way an experienced player would solve it. Nineteen open tiles, four words: the length rows say 3, 5, 5 and 6.
Step 1 · Read the walls. The second and fourth rows are almost all wall. Only their end tiles are open: N and R on the second row, W and R on the fourth. Each of those tiles touches just two neighbors, one above and one below, so whichever word passes through it must run vertically at that point. Those four tiles are the hinges of the whole board.
Step 2 · Start at a corner. The top-right corner E touches only K to its left and R below it. Reading leftwards from E gives E-K-A-B, and reading the other way, B-A-K-E then down to R spells BAKER. Five letters, and there is a five-letter row waiting. Trace it and it locks in.
Step 3 · Follow the forced corridor. The top-left I now touches only N below it, because B beside it is taken. I-N-T continues down the left edge and then has to turn right along the middle row: T-A-C-T spells INTACT. Six letters for the six-letter row.
Step 4 · Finish with what is left. Seven tiles remain: W, I, T down and along the bottom-left, and B, R, A, C, E down the right edge and back along the bottom row. W-I-T is WIT, the three-letter word, and B-R-A-C-E is BRACE, the second five. Every tile is used once. Solved.
Notice that we never guessed. Every move came from a tile that had only one way in or out. That is the whole skill of Wend, and the tips page goes deeper into how to find those tiles quickly on bigger boards.