What Is Wend?

Wend in one paragraph

Wend is a word puzzle played on a small square grid, 5×5, 6×6 or 7×7, dotted with gray wall tiles. Four to seven words are hidden in the open tiles. You trace each word by dragging from letter to letter, moving only up, down, left or right, and winding around the walls. The words never overlap, and when all of them are placed every open tile is covered. You are not told which words to find, only how long each one is. Every board has exactly one solution.

The name is the old English verb to wend, to travel by a winding route, which is exactly what the words do.

Where Wend came from

Wend launched in June 2026 as the newest addition to LinkedIn's daily games, the lineup that includes Queens, Tango, Zip and Patches. Like its siblings it is a once-a-day puzzle: the same board for everyone, a timer, and a result you can share with colleagues. Its ancestry is the “word path” family of puzzles, where letters are connected by adjacency rather than read in straight lines, combined with the fill-the-grid logic of puzzles like Zip.

This site is an independent home for the same puzzle. It follows the same rules and adds what the official daily does not have: unlimited boards, a complete archive, a choice of grid size, and no sign-in. The differences are laid out on the LinkedIn Wend page.

How a Wend board works

The grid and the walls

A board is a square of letter tiles with some tiles blocked out as walls. Walls are fixed before you start and words cannot pass through them. Their job is to shape the open tiles into corridors and pockets so that the words fit together in only one way. Take the walls away and most boards would have several valid answers; the walls are what make Wend a logic puzzle rather than a guessing game.

The length rows

Under the grid sits one row of blank tiles per hidden word, shortest first. Those rows are your only clue to the words. Add the lengths together and you get the number of open tiles exactly, which is the central constraint of the puzzle: every word has to take its tiles from a budget that leaves the right shapes for the others.

Tracing

Press on a letter and drag through neighboring tiles to spell a word, then release. A correct word locks in with its own color band and its length row fills in. A wrong trace flashes and clears. There is no penalty beyond a mistake count, and the Hint button reveals one letter at a time rather than a whole word, so a stuck board can always be nudged forward. The full rules, every tool and a worked example are on the how to play page.

How Wend compares to other word games

Wend borrows from several familiar puzzles and ends up unlike any of them.

The closest relative is Strands, the New York Times game where theme words tile a grid. Wend keeps the tiling idea but drops the theme and the diagonal moves, and adds walls. The result is a puzzle that rewards spatial reasoning as much as vocabulary: you can often place the longest word by shape alone before you have read it.

Why people like it

• It is short. A daily Wend takes two to five minutes. It fits in a coffee break, which is where most people play it.
• It is fair. One solution, no obscure words, no trick clues. Every board can be finished by deduction with no guessing.
• It is two puzzles at once. The logic of fitting shapes into a grid and the language of recognizing a word from four scattered letters. Solvers who are strong at one tend to get better at the other.
• It scales. A 5×5 is a warm-up; a 7×7 is a real sit-down puzzle. The same four rules cover both.

Three sizes, one rule set

Boards come in 5×5, 6×6 and 7×7. The word count and the longest word grow with the grid: up to five words and a six-letter word on a 5×5, up to seven words and an eight-letter word on a 7×7. The daily puzzle rotates through all three sizes, so a week of dailies is a mix of quick and demanding boards.

Where to play Wend

The official daily is inside LinkedIn's games section and needs a LinkedIn account. Here you can play today's Wend free with no account, then keep going with Wend Unlimited or any past day from the archive. New players should start with the how to play guide, which ends with a practice board, and then read the strategy tips once the rules feel natural.

Frequently asked questions