Play Word Weave • Free

There is no typing here. Every level gives you a small ring of letters, and the whole game is swiping across them in the right order to spell a word that belongs somewhere in the grid above. Get it right and it locks in; get it wrong and nothing happens except that you try again.

The letters in the ring do not change between words within a level - the same handful gets reused for every answer, which is what makes the puzzle work. A four-letter word and a six-letter word from the same level are drawn from an overlapping pool, so solving one often makes the next one more obvious, because you have effectively ruled a few letters back into play.

The shuffle button exists because a ring can sit in an order that is genuinely awkward to trace with a finger, particularly on a phone. It does not change the puzzle - it only rearranges the letters in place - so there is no reason not to use it whenever the layout feels clumsy.

The words you find are not solved in isolation. They all land in a single shared crossword grid, and because words cross each other, letters you place while solving one answer are often already sitting there when you reach the next.

That is the real difficulty curve of the game. Early words in a level are the hardest, because the grid is empty and you have nothing to lean on beyond the letters in the ring. By the last word or two, several of its letters are usually already filled in from the words around it, and the puzzle becomes closer to confirming a word than finding one from scratch.

It rewards working the grid loosely rather than word by word - glancing at which cells are already filled before committing to a swipe often shortens the search considerably.

Solving a puzzle pays out gems, and gems are the only thing that buys a hint. There is no separate reward for speed and no bonus for a clean run without a wrong guess - a slow, careful solve earns exactly what a fast one does. The economy is built around solving, not performing.

That matters for how you should treat a hint. Since gems only come from finishing puzzles, spending one to get unstuck on a hard level is not a loss you need to be precious about, provided you are generally clearing levels faster than you are burning hints on them. Hoarding gems for no reason just means sitting stuck on a level you could get past.

There is no way to buy gems directly and no advertising built into the flow, as far as the game's own data shows - the only source is finishing levels.

The level select is split into chapters rather than one long list, and levels within a chapter unlock in order as you clear what comes before them - there is no jumping ahead to preview a later one. Across the whole game there are 500 levels, running from short three-letter answers early on up to seven-letter words later.

Because the letter pool and the grid both grow with the word length, a seven-letter level is not simply a longer version of a three-letter one - there are more cross-references to track and more of the ring to hold in mind while you search. The jump in difficulty across the game is more about how much you are juggling at once than about any single word being obscure.

Progress is saved locally in your browser as you go, so closing the tab mid-level does not cost you the chapter you have reached.