How to play Elided
Sixteen letters sit in a row. You spell a word by tapping them left to right. The letters do not have to touch — you may skip over as many as you like, and skipping is what the game pays you for.
The one rule that matters
A word counts if its letters appear in the board in order. Not necessarily next to each other — just in order. Word games usually ask for one of two things: a path through adjacent tiles, as in Boggle or Squaredle, or an anagram of a letter set, as in Spelling Bee. Elided asks for a third thing, an ordered subsequence, and rewards you for the letters you leave behind.
T E H L I P R D N A E K S O R T ▔ ▔ ▔ ▔ ▔ E L I D E
A magenta thread stitches over the letters you take and dips under the ones you skip.
Scoring
- Length is worth far more than you expect. A word scores twice its length cubed, so a nine-letter word is worth about eleven four-letter words. Chasing one long word usually beats grinding several short ones.
- Every letter you skip multiplies. Each letter you step over is worth another whole copy of the word, and the copies land on that word as you play it — nothing is held back and totalled up at the end of the run. Take a four-letter word using the first and last tiles on the board and you have skipped twelve, so it scores thirteen times what the same word would score from four tiles sitting together. A short word spanning the board beats a long word taken from neighbours.
- Letters you leave behind get older, and old letters pay more. Ignoring a corner of the board is a deliberate investment.
The run
A run is a budget, not a clock. You start with 100 letters to spend. Playing a word costs one letter for each letter in it; a word the dictionary rejects costs two. When the budget runs out, the run is over — so a long word is not only worth more, it is better value.
Two escape hatches, both priced. A redeal throws the board away and deals sixteen fresh tiles for 16 letters, and asks you to confirm before it does. You also get three hints per run; a hint lights up every tile of the longest word still on the board, and that word then scores nothing. You are paid in fresh letters, not points.
Charged letters
Some tiles arrive carrying something. They are uncommon, and you find out what you have by using it.
- Time — adds twelve letters back to your budget.
- Multiplier — multiplies that word's score by the figure on the tile.
- Wild — stands in for any letter you need.
- Bomb — clears the whole board away.
- Rot — darkens every time a word steps over it. Skip it three times and the tile dies where it sits.
The daily puzzle
Everyone gets the same sixteen letters each day, dealt from a fixed seed with no server involved. You get one ranked attempt per date, ever — the day is sealed when you finish it, and reloading the page will not give you another run. That is the point: a score means something because you only get one.
Free play deals a random board whenever you want one. It keeps a personal best and nothing else — it cannot touch your daily. Past days remain playable from the archive, each under the same one-attempt rule.
Sharing
The share is deliberately spoiler-free. It shows the shape of your solve — one coloured square per word, in the order you found them, plus your score — and never the words themselves. Anyone who has not played yet can read it without having the puzzle ruined.