Words From Words: Sea

How to play Words From Words: Sea

Each level gives you a handful of letters and a crossword to fill.

• Swipe across the letters on a touch screen to connect them into a word.
• With a mouse, hold the button on the first letter and drag through the rest.
• Every letter can be used once per word, and the same letters serve every answer.
• Correct words drop into their place in the grid.
• Fill every slot to finish the level.

Reading the grid

The empty slots are the clue set. Their lengths tell you what to look for, and their crossings tell you which letters have to line up.

Once two or three answers are in place, the remaining slots are heavily constrained by the letters already crossing them, and the level usually falls apart quickly from there.

Bonus words

Valid words that are not in the grid still count for something rather than being rejected outright. They are worth finding when you are stuck, since they cost nothing and often keep the coins topped up for a hint later.

Tips and strategy

Fill the longest slot first

The longest answer uses the most letters, which means it is the one with the fewest possible candidates. It is also the answer that puts the most crossing letters into the grid for everything else.

Chasing the short slots first feels productive and leaves you with the hardest word and the least help.

Rearrange the letters

There is a shuffle for a reason. Your ability to see a word inside a set of letters depends heavily on the order they are sitting in, which is why an answer you could not see for two minutes becomes obvious after a shuffle.

Use it freely. It costs nothing and it is not cheating, it is working around a limitation of how reading works.

Try the prefixes and endings systematically

When nothing comes, stop looking for whole words and start assembling parts. Put an s or an ed at the end, put un or re at the front, and see what the remaining letters can do.

This turns a memory search into a construction problem, and construction problems are the kind you can grind through methodically.

Use the crossings, not the definitions

There are no clues here, only lengths and crossings. That makes the grid closer to a logic puzzle than to a crossword.

When a slot has two letters already crossing it, write out the pattern in your head, letter, blank, blank, letter, and search the pool for something that fits the shape. Shape matching is much faster than free recall.

Save the hint for the last slot

Hints are worth most when one answer is blocking a completed level, and worth least at the start when a dozen answers remain and any of them would unblock you.

If you are going to spend one, spend it on the final stubborn slot rather than the first one you cannot see.

Playing a long run

The levels are short and progress carries over, which makes this the sort of game that fits into small gaps rather than a sitting.

The letters get harder gradually, mostly by adding one more to the pool. Seven letters is a comfortably larger search than six, and eight is considerably larger than seven, so a level that suddenly feels hard is usually a level that added a letter.

Two and three letter answers

Short slots are worth attention out of proportion to their size. They cost almost nothing to fill, they are the ones people skip, and each one drops a letter into a crossing that constrains something much longer.

Run through the obvious short combinations when a level stalls. Take each consonant in the pool and pair it with each vowel, and then try the three letter versions of the same pairs. It is a small set and it takes a few seconds.

There is a caveat worth knowing. Some grids do not use very short words at all, and their shortest slot is four letters. Check the grid before spending time on this, because hunting two letter answers in a puzzle that has none is a good way to lose a minute.

When the grid does use them, they are usually the fastest route into the crossings that make the long answers readable.

More word puzzles here

Word Connect Puzzle is the same swipe and grid format with a different theme, Casual Crossword uses real clues instead of a letter pool, and Words Swipe hides the letters in stacks. More in word and crossword.