About Side Words

Side Words is a letter square puzzle. Twelve letters are arranged around the outside of a square, three to a side, and your job is to use every one of them in a short chain of words. It belongs to the same family as boggle-style tracing games, but it inverts the usual problem. In most word searches you are hunting for as many words as possible. Here you want as few as possible, and finding a long word is only useful if it helps you reach the letters you have not touched yet. That single change turns a vocabulary test into a coverage puzzle.

Every board on this page is generated from a real two-word answer and then checked by a separate solver before it is served, so a two-word solution always exists even when you cannot see it. There is no such thing as an impossible Side Words board here, which matters more than it sounds: in a puzzle this open ended, not knowing whether you are stuck or the board is broken ruins the game.

How to play

1. Tap letters to spell a word of at least three letters, then submit it.
2. Two consecutive letters may never come from the same side of the square. You can jump to any other side freely.
3. Each new word must begin with the final letter of your previous word, so your words form a chain.
4. Letters are never used up. You can revisit a letter as often as you like.
5. You win the moment all twelve letters have been used at least once.

Strategy

Start from the awkward letters, not the easy ones. Look for the least friendly letters on the board first, typically J, Q, V, X or Z, and also any lonely vowel. Those letters appear in far fewer words, so they decide your solution. A word that uses two of them is worth more than a longer word made of common letters, because the common letters will turn up again in almost anything you play later.

Choose your first word for where it ends. The last letter of your first word is the first letter of your second, so it is really a decision about what you have to build next. Ending on S, E, R, T or N leaves you with thousands of options. Ending on a rare letter can strand you, and you will burn a whole extra word climbing back out.

Count what is left, not what you have used. Coverage is the win condition, so the useful number is how many letters remain untouched. Once you are down to three or four, stop hunting for elegant words and search specifically for something containing those letters. The letter counter above the board is there for exactly this.

Use the side rule as a filter. Because consecutive letters must change side, any word with a double letter is automatically illegal. So are many natural pairings when the two letters happen to sit together. Before typing a promising word, glance at where its letters sit. Ruling words out on sight is faster than submitting and being told no.

Common mistakes

• Playing a long, impressive word that only covers letters you had already used. Length is not the score. Coverage is.
• Forgetting the chain rule and planning a perfect second word that does not start with the right letter.
• Trying words with double letters. Two identical letters in a row always sit on the same side, so they can never be legal.
• Saving the hardest letter for last. By then your starting letter is fixed by the chain, and the word you need may not exist.

A worked example

Suppose the sides read E I A, M X Z, N L S and C O D. The X and Z jump out immediately, and they sit on the same side, so no word can use them back to back. MAXIMIZE solves both at once: M, A, X, I, M, I, Z, E alternates sides all the way through and clears the two worst letters in one move. It ends on E, so the second word must start with E, and the letters still missing are N, L, S, C, O and D. ENCLOSED uses every one of them. Two words, twelve letters, board solved. Notice the order of reasoning: the rare letters chose the first word, and the first word chose the second.

More word puzzles

If you like tracing letters into words, try Boggle for the opposite challenge of finding as many words as possible, or Word Hunt for a timed version. For a grouping puzzle rather than a tracing one, try Connections. For a letter-by-letter deduction game, try Word Guess. You can also play the daily Side Words puzzle or work through the archive of past boards.