Wend Tips & Strategy

Wend looks like a word game, but it is solved like a logic puzzle. The letters matter less than you think; the walls, the corners and the word lengths do most of the work. This guide assumes you know the four rules and shows you how to apply them quickly.

The order of operations

New players scan the grid hoping to spot a word. Experienced players do not look for words at all until they have read the shape of the board. In this order:

1. Count the length rows. Before touching a tile, note the word lengths under the grid. They tell you how the open tiles are divided and which word is longest.
2. Find the dead ends. Any open tile with only one open neighbor must be the first or last letter of a word. Mark them in your head.
3. Find the corridors. Any run of tiles one tile wide has to carry a single word straight through it.
4. Place the longest word. It has the fewest possible paths. Start it from a dead end or a corridor and it usually reveals itself.
5. Fill the pockets. Once the long word is in, the remaining open tiles split into small regions whose sizes match the remaining lengths.
6. Re-scan. Every placed word creates new dead ends. Go back to step two.

Most 5×5 and 6×6 boards fall to steps two, three and four alone. The rest of this page is about doing each step faster.

Walls dictate word shape

The gray walls are the puzzle. They are placed so that each word has exactly one path, and the way they do that is by squeezing words into shapes. Look at this real 5×5:

The left column, P-R-A-I-S, is one tile wide for four rows. Nothing can enter it from the side, so whatever word uses those tiles has to run straight down (or straight up) through all of them. The same is true of the right column, O-X-I-C-L. Before you have read a single letter you already know the board contains two vertical words of at least four letters, and the length rows say 3, 4, 5 and 6. That means the five and the six live in the columns, and the three and the four have to fit in what is left.

Dead-end tiles force word starts

A dead end is an open tile with only one open neighbor. It cannot sit in the middle of a word, because a word has to enter and leave a middle tile through two different neighbors. So a dead end is always a first or last letter.

On this board the A in the second row touches only the W above it, and the C in the fourth row touches only the O below it. The three-letter word has to start or end at one of them. A-W-E reads upward and left into the top row, and it is the only three-letter path from that A, so AWE is in. From the C, the only route is C-O-A-L along the bottom row: COAL, the four. Now the columns are forced: TOXIC down the right and PRAISE down the left and along the bottom.

Corners are the most common dead ends, but check the tiles beside walls too. On 7×7 boards the walls often create a pocket that is a dead end from the inside, and those are the tiles new players miss.

Use the length rows as a budget

The rows under the grid are not just a checklist. They are a budget for the open tiles. If a wall cuts the board into a region of exactly seven tiles and one of your rows has seven blanks, that region is that word. If a region has nine tiles and your remaining rows are 4 and 5, the two words split it, and there are usually only one or two ways to do that.

The reverse is just as useful. A region of six tiles cannot hold the eight-letter word, so the eight must pass through a gap in the wall and take tiles on both sides. Find the gap and you have found the middle of the longest word.

Place the longest word first

Short words are flexible: a three-letter word fits in almost any corner. The longest word is the opposite. A seven-letter word on a 6×6 has to bend through the walls in one specific way, and once it is placed the board has a third fewer tiles and several new dead ends. Even if you cannot see the whole word, you can usually see where it must go: start from a dead end and follow the only path until it branches. By then you have three or four letters and the word tends to announce itself.

Letters that give the game away

• Rare letters. Q, X, Z and J appear in very few words. When you see one, the word around it is nearly fixed. A Q almost always has a U next to it.
• Vowel-starved pockets. A run of consonants with no vowel nearby usually belongs to the end of a word: -NG, -ST, -CK, -TCH. That tells you which direction the word runs.
• Common endings near an edge. I-N-G, E-R or E-D tucked against a wall are usually a word's last three letters, which means the word approaches them from the open side.
• Double letters. Two of the same letter side by side are almost always inside one word (LETTER, COFFEE), not the boundary between two.

Tracing habits that save time

• Drag back to erase. If you overshoot a corner, slide back over the previous tile and the last step disappears. You never need to lift and restart.
• Short traces are free. Traces under three letters are cleared without being checked, so a stray tap costs nothing. Only a full wrong word flashes red.
• Palindromes trace either way. LEVEL, KAYAK and their kind lock in from either end. Everything else must be traced from first letter to last, so if a word will not lock in, try the other direction.
• Use the keyboard on desktop. Arrow keys move, Enter adds a tile, Enter on the last tile submits. It is precise around tight corners.
• Watch the colors. Every placed word is a colored band. If two bands leave a single uncolored tile stranded between them, one of those words is wrong.

Size-specific advice

5×5

Four words, sometimes five, on up to nineteen open tiles. The corners do almost all the work: at least two of the four corners are dead ends on most layouts, and the longest word nearly always starts in one of them. Aim to solve a 5×5 without a single rejected trace.

6×6

Five or six words, with a seven-letter word that usually bends twice. Find the corridors first; the walls on a 6×6 tend to build one long corridor that the seven runs through. The short words then fall into the pockets on either side.

7×7

Six or seven words and an eight-letter word. The walls form real rooms, and the eight often passes through two of them. Work room by room: count each room's tiles, match it against your remaining lengths, and only trace once the budget tells you which word lives there.

When you get stuck

Stuck rarely means there is no information left. It means you missed a forced tile or placed an earlier word on the wrong path. Run this checklist:

1. Re-count the length rows. Which lengths are left, and how many open tiles remain?
2. Find every open tile with one neighbor. Each is a word's start or end.
3. Look for a region whose tile count matches exactly one remaining length.
4. Check for a stranded tile: a single open tile with no open neighbors. If there is one, a placed word is wrong. Undo it.
5. Press Hint with an empty trace. It reveals only the first letter of the shortest missing word, which is often enough to unlock the region without spoiling the word.

Every board in our pool has exactly one solution, so the walls always leave a deduction available. If you find yourself guessing, you have missed a constraint, not run out of them.

Habits that build speed

• Warm up on a 5×5. Reading walls is pattern recognition, and it sharpens after one quick board. A two-minute 5×5 unlimited board before the daily pays for itself.
• Replay the archive. Old dailies in the archive are the best practice set because they are the same mix of sizes and layouts as the ones still to come.
• Race your own time. Your best time for daily and unlimited is saved. Beating it by ten seconds is a better goal than beating a stranger's.
• Learn the layouts. Our pool is built from a curated library of wall patterns. After a few dozen boards you will recognize them on sight and know where the dead ends are before you read a letter.

Frequently asked questions