How to play Word Tracer
Find as many words as you can by tracing a path across touching letter tiles before the clock runs out. Play solo to practise, or race other players live.
The basics
Each round deals a board of rounded letter tiles. A word is made by moving from tile to tile, where every next letter must touch the one before it: left, right, up, down or diagonally. Each tile can be used only once in the same word, but you can reuse it in as many different words as you like.
For example, on this row you can trace STAR by moving across four touching tiles:
S T A R EKeep going to the E and you have STARE, a longer word worth more points.
Words must be in the dictionary and at least three letters long (four in Gold and Champion). Proper nouns and abbreviations don't count. Word Tracer uses the ENABLE word list, a public-domain list of more than 170,000 English words used by many word games.
Three ways to enter a word
Drag
Press on the first letter and slide across the next ones without lifting your finger or mouse button. Let go to play the word. Slide back onto the previous tile to undo a letter. Let go off the board to cancel.
Tap or click
Prefer not to drag? Turn on Tap or click letters in your profile settings. Tap each letter in turn, then tap the last letter again to play the word.
Type
On a computer you can simply type. The board lights up the path for your word as you go, and the letters turn grey if the word can't be traced. Press Enter to play, Backspace to delete a letter and Esc to start over.
Scoring
Longer words score far more than short ones:
| Word length | Points |
|---|---|
| 3 letters | 10 |
| 4 letters | 15 |
| 5 letters | 25 |
| 6 letters | 40 |
| 7 letters | 60 |
| 8 letters | 80 |
| Each letter after 8 | +20 |
Every word scores on its best possible path. If a word can be traced two ways, say once through a bonus tile and once without, you get the higher score automatically, however you entered it.
Bonus and special tiles
E 2x tiles double the score of any word that passes through them.
S 3x tiles triple it. A word that uses both a 2x and a 3x tile scores six times its points.
D Penalty tiles appear in Champion. Each one a word passes through takes 20 points off that word (a word never scores below zero).
Bonus tiles still have a letter on them. The small badge in the corner shows the multiplier.
Rounds and board shapes
A match is three or four rounds, and every round uses a different board shape. Early shapes are compact and friendly; higher tiers add holes, narrow bridges and islands that make long paths harder to find.
| Tier | Rounds | Round length | Shortest word | Room size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bronze | 3 | 3:00 | 3 letters | up to 30 |
| Silver | 3 | 3:00 | 3 letters | up to 20 |
| Gold | 4 | 2:30 | 4 letters | up to 15 |
| Champion | 4 | 2:00 | 4 letters | up to 10 |
Tiers: Bronze to Champion
Everyone starts in Bronze. Word points decide who wins each match; XP is what moves you up. Every online match earns XP based on where you finish, from 10 XP for first place down to 1 XP, so everyone who plays the whole match makes progress.
| Finish (30-player room) | XP |
|---|---|
| 1st | 10 |
| 2nd | 8 |
| 3rd | 7 |
| 4th–6th | 6 |
| 7th–9th | 5 |
| 10th–12th | 4 |
| 13th–15th | 3 |
| 16th–21st | 2 |
| 22nd–30th | 1 |
To earn XP, find at least one word in every round of the match and stay until the end. Players who sit out a round, join part-way through, or leave early still appear in the standings but don't earn XP for that match. Places are shared when scores tie, but never at zero.
Smaller rooms use the same bands by share of the room. Collect enough XP and you're promoted to the next tier, announced to the whole room. Promotion is for good: from then on you play in your new tier, with bigger, trickier boards, fewer vowels and tougher opponents. You can still watch any room. Solo practice is for training and doesn't earn XP.
Playing online
Pick a room in the lobby and join. A match starts a short countdown once two players are in. Everyone plays the same board at the same time and scores every word they find, so a big room never takes points away from you.
Between rounds there's a short break with the scoreboard, your words and every other word that was on the board. In Bronze and Silver, if you arrive while a round is underway you watch it and join in from the next break. Gold and Champion matches can only be joined at the start, so arrive early or watch until the next match begins.
Spectators see the board a few seconds behind live play, so nobody can feed words to the players. Quick reactions like gg and nice are open to everyone; free-text chat opens once you've earned 500 points. Players see chat between rounds, so it never distracts from the board.
Tips for finding more words
- Hunt for endings. Once you find a word, look for an S, ED, ER or ING nearby. STAR, STARE and STARED can all come from one corner of the board.
- Look for common pairs. Letter pairs like TH, ST, ER, RE and IN start or end thousands of words.
- Work around vowels. Vowels connect words together. A tile surrounded by vowels is worth checking from every direction.
- Route through bonus tiles. A five-letter word through a 3x tile beats most long words. Check whether a word you've found can be stretched to pass through one.
- Don't stop at short words. Three-letter words add up, but a single seven-letter word is worth six of them.
- Practise solo. Solo practice uses the same boards and scoring with no pressure. After each round, review the words you missed to train your eye.