Word Swipe

How to play Word Swipe

• Press and hold, then drag a line through letters that touch each other.
• Letters may connect in any direction, including diagonally.
• Release to submit. A valid word clears and new letters drop in.
• Words are three letters or longer.
• Use the bomb to clear part of the board when nothing is coming.
• Each level has a target to reach before the clock stops.

The line

The one rule that governs everything is that each letter has to touch the one before it. A word cannot jump across the board.

That sounds obvious and it is the reason most players score badly. Your eye finds the word first and then looks for a path, which usually does not exist. The faster habit is the reverse: look at a cluster of four or five touching tiles and ask what those specific letters can make.

The bomb

The bomb is not an emergency button, it is a resource with a best moment. Spending it on the first board that resists is how players end a level with an unused item and thirty seconds of dead time.

The right moment is when two things are true at once: you cannot see a word, and the clock still has enough left to use the new letters. A bomb with four seconds remaining is a wasted bomb.

Levels

Each level sets a target rather than simply running you until the timer expires. That changes the calculation late in a round. If you are close to target, a run of three letter words gets you over the line. If you are far from it, only a long word will do, and grinding out short ones is just a slower way of failing.

Tips and strategy

Scanning

• Work in clusters, not in words. Pick any three touching tiles and read them in all six orders before moving on.
• Scan the corners first. Corner tiles have the fewest neighbours, which means fewer paths, which means they are the tiles most likely to still be sitting there at the end of the round.
• After every clear, look at where the new letters landed rather than rereading the whole grid. The board only changed in one region.

Building longer words

• Endings pay for themselves. If you spot an S, an ER, a ED or an ING adjacent to a cluster, build backwards from it.
• Prefixes are the cheapest extension in the game. RE, UN and IN turn a word you already found into a longer one on the same path, if the letters happen to touch.
• Diagonals are where the long words hide. Most players scan horizontally and vertically out of habit and never see them.

Clock management

• Take the short word when the clock is under ten seconds. An unfinished long word scores nothing.
• Do not stall on a board you cannot read. Any valid word refreshes tiles and often opens the rest.
• Save the last five seconds for a word you have already found and not yet drawn. Hunting in the final seconds almost never lands.

Common mistakes

• Looking for the word before looking for the path. The path is the constraint, not the vocabulary.
• Hoarding the bomb until the round is already lost.
• Ignoring three letter words. They keep the board moving, and a board that moves gives you the long word eventually.