Wend Game: Play the Daily Word Path Puzzle Free Online

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A grid of letters. Three hidden words winding through it. And the only clue you get is how long each word is: 6 · 5 · 5. That is Wend — the daily word-path puzzle — and this page holds GameOLL's own version of it. Drag across the letters to trace a path; when your letters spell one of the hidden words it locks in green, and when every letter belongs to a found word the grid is cleared. There are 30 set puzzles in three sizes plus a Daily Wend that is the same for every player, and every single grid has exactly one solution, proven by computer search before it ships. It is free, it runs in your browser on phone or PC, and there is nothing to download or sign up for.

🎮 Genre: Word Puzzle · 👤 1 Player · 📱 Browser (no download) · 💰 Free

In this guide

• How to play Wend
• Controls — drag, lift, undo
• The 30 set puzzles: three sizes
• The Daily Wend and your streak
• Stars, hints and wrong traces
• Six tips to trace faster
• One solution, proven — how we check
• Wend FAQ
• Final verdict

How to play Wend

A Wend grid looks like a small square of loose letters — 4 by 4, 5 by 5 or 6 by 6. Hidden inside it, a few ordinary English words wind through the cells on paths that bend and turn. The paths never overlap, and every single cell belongs to exactly one word. You are not told what the words are. You are told only their lengths, shown above the grid — for example 6 · 5 · 5. Your job is to find every word and trace its path.

Tracing is done with one drag. Press on the first letter of a word and slide through neighbouring cells — up, down, left or right, never diagonally. The cells you pass over light up gold and the game spells out what you have traced so far. When you lift your finger, the game tests the path: if the letters spell one of the hidden words, read forwards or backwards, the whole path locks in green. If they do not, the path lifts away and you try another route. There is no timer pressure and no penalty beyond a wrong-trace count that affects your stars.

Here is the first set puzzle on this page, so you can see a real grid and its real answer. The letters are:

C	P	L	Y
O	M	G	M
G	U	A	E
E	A	I	D

The hidden lengths are 6 · 5 · 5, and the three words solve like this:

1. COMPLY (6). Start at the C in the top-left corner and drop straight down to the O, step right to the M, then climb back up to the P and run along the top row to finish — L, Y. Six letters, three turns, and the whole top of the grid is spoken for.
2. GAUGE (5). Take the G just right of the centre, drop down to the A under it, then run left through the U and the second G, and drop to the E in the bottom-left corner.
3. MEDIA (5). The last word fills what is left: M at the right edge, straight down through the E to the D in the corner, then left along the bottom row — I, A. Notice that once the first two words are locked, this path is the only shape the remaining cells can make. That is the one-solution promise doing its work.

One rule deserves a spotlight, because it makes the game fair: a word can lock in the wrong place. Your traced letters might spell a hidden word on cells that are not that word's real home — the spelling is right, the address is wrong. When that happens the rest of the grid will refuse to fit together, and the fix is built in: tap any letter of a locked word and it lifts, freeing its cells so you can trace it somewhere else. Undo does the same thing for your most recent lock.

Controls — drag, lift, undo

Everything is drag-first for phones, with keyboard helpers on PC. The full control list:

Action	How
Trace a word	Press a letter and drag through neighbouring cells (up, down, left or right). Lift your finger to test the path.
Shorten a trace	While dragging, slide back over the last cell to remove it, or drag back along your own path to trim it.
Cancel a trace	On PC, press Escape before you lift. Or just lift — a path that spells nothing wrong simply lifts away.
Lift a locked word	Tap any letter of the green word. Its cells become free again.
Undo the last lock	Tap the Undo button, or press U on a PC keyboard.
Get a hint	Tap the Hint button, or press H. A hint lights up the starting cell of a word you have not found, in a gold ring. You have 3 hints per puzzle.
Restart the puzzle	Tap Restart to clear every lock, hint and the timer and start the same grid fresh.
Open the puzzle list	Tap the 📚 Puzzles button at the top of the game.
Play the Daily	Tap the 📅 Daily button at the top of the game, or Play Daily on the menu.
Sound on or off	Tap the speaker button at the top of the game. Your choice is remembered.

The 30 set puzzles: three sizes

The set puzzles are where you learn the game and chase stars. They come in three sizes of ten, and the shape of the challenge changes completely as the grid grows, because the words get longer and the paths get more room to wind.

Size	Grid	Hidden words	Word lengths	What to expect
Starter	4 by 4	3 per puzzle	6 · 5 · 5	Tight little grids where every letter is near an edge. Puzzle 1 hides COMPLY, GAUGE and MEDIA; by Puzzle 10 you are untangling ORACLE, BATON and VOWEL.
Classic	5 by 5	4 per puzzle	7 · 6 · 6 · 6	The full Wend shape. Four words share 25 cells, wrong locks become a real risk, and lifting cleanly matters. Puzzle 11 opens with TOBACCO, OUTLET, RIDDEN and ENGINE.
Expert	6 by 6	5 per puzzle	8 · 7 · 7 · 7 · 7	Thirty-six cells and five long words, including an 8-letter anchor in every grid. Puzzle 21 leads with WHATEVER, ERRATIC, QUALITY, TRIPPED and INVERSE.

Nothing is locked away: you can open any puzzle in any order, and your stars and best times save per puzzle, so the list slowly fills with your results. A good way to play is to clear a size at 1 star first, then come back and hunt the missing stars — the second pass feels like a different game, because now a sloppy wrong-place lock costs you something.

The Daily Wend and your streak

Every day there is one Daily Wend, picked from a pool of 60 proven puzzles by the date on your own device — so it is the same grid for every player on the same day, wherever they are. Dailies rotate through all three sizes, which keeps the habit fresh: a quick 4 by 4 on Monday, a full 6 by 6 fight on Tuesday.

Solve the Daily and your streak grows by one. Miss a day and the streak resets to 1 on your next solve — there are no freezes or second chances, which is exactly what makes a long streak worth having. You can replay a solved Daily as often as you like for a cleaner run; the streak only counts the first solve of the day. Yesterday's grid is gone at midnight, so the habit the game asks for is small and daily: one grid, a few minutes, keep the chain alive.

Stars, hints and wrong traces

The star rule is printed in the game and it never changes. Finish a puzzle with no hints used and no wrong traces and you earn 3 stars. Finish with at most 1 hint and at most 2 wrong traces and you earn 2 stars. Any other finish earns 1 star. There are 90 stars across the 30 set puzzles, and your running total sits at the top of the game.

A wrong trace is any drag you release whose letters do not spell a hidden word. Wrong traces are information, not failure — each one tells you a shape the answer does not use — but they are counted, because a perfect run should mean something. The sneakiest star-killer is the wrong-place lock: the word is real, the spelling is right, but the cells belong to a different arrangement. If the leftovers stop fitting, lift the lock and re-trace it. That is not a bug in your solve; it is the puzzle testing whether you trust the fit over the find.

Hints here are honest and specific. A hint does not wave at a region — it lights up the exact starting cell of one word you have not found yet, ringed in gold: the first letter of that word's true path. From a known start, a word of known length has far fewer shapes to try, so one hint usually cracks a stuck grid open. You get 3 per puzzle, and a hint used well still leaves 2 stars on the table.

Six tips to trace faster

1. Hunt the longest word first. The longest word has the fewest places it can live, because it needs the longest unbroken winding run. Find the 6, 7 or 8 first and the shorter words fall into the space that is left.
2. Anchor on rare letters. A J, Q, X, Z or K can only belong to a word that contains it, and there is usually just one candidate. Scan the grid for its rarest letter and build that word around it before touching anything common.
3. Work the corners and edges. A path that steps into a corner must either end there or leave by the corner's only other neighbour. Corners and edges squeeze a path's shape hard, so they are the cheapest places to test a guess.
4. Mind the leftovers. After a lock, look at the free cells. A free cell with only one free neighbour cannot sit in the middle of a word — it must be a word's first or last letter. Start or end your traces there.
5. Match the shapes to the lengths. The free cells break into clusters as you lock words in. A cluster of 5 free cells must hold a whole remaining word of length 5 — or parts of two words that touch it. Compare cluster sizes with the lengths still on the board before you trace.
6. Lift, do not force. If the last region will not split into the remaining lengths, one of your locks is in the wrong place — even if it spelled a real word. Tap it, lift it, and re-trace. Solvers who lift early finish faster than solvers who push on.

One solution, proven — how we check

Every grid on this page carries a promise: there is exactly one way to solve it. Not one intended way — one way, full stop. Before a puzzle ships, a computer checker takes the finished grid and tries to split it into dictionary words of the given lengths in every possible arrangement of winding paths. If it finds a second split, the puzzle is thrown away and never reaches this page. Only grids with a count of exactly one are kept.

The dictionary behind that check is deliberately strict. It holds 38,038 cleaned English words of 5 to 8 letters, built from standard word lists and frequency data, with names, abbreviations and rude words removed. The hidden words themselves are drawn from the 18,058 most familiar words on that list, so the answers are everyday words — the grid above hides COMPLY, GAUGE and MEDIA, not obscurities. What the strict check buys you is certainty: when a region will not fit, the fault is in a lock you placed, never in the puzzle. There is always a fit, and there is only one.

Wend FAQ

What is a wend game?

A wend game hides a few words inside a grid of letters. Each word follows a winding path of neighbouring cells, the paths never overlap, and every cell is used exactly once. You are told only the length of each word, and you find the words by dragging across the letters to trace their paths. In this version there are 30 set puzzles in three sizes — 4 by 4, 5 by 5 and 6 by 6 — plus a Daily Wend, and every grid has exactly one solution.

How do you play Wend?

Press on a letter and drag through neighbouring cells — up, down, left or right, no diagonals — then lift your finger to test the path. If the letters spell one of the hidden words, read forwards or backwards, the word locks in green. If a locked word turns out to be in the wrong place, tap any of its letters to lift it and free the cells. Clear the grid by finding every word.

What does it mean that every Wend puzzle has one solution?

It means a computer searched every possible way to split the grid into dictionary words of the given lengths before the puzzle shipped, and found exactly one split that works. The lengths above the grid plus the letters inside it pin the answer down completely — there is no second arrangement hiding anywhere, so if your locks stop fitting, one of them is in the wrong place and can be lifted.

What happens if I trace the wrong path?

The path simply lifts and you try again. A wrong trace is counted, and it matters for stars — a 3-star finish needs no wrong traces at all — but there is no other penalty, no lost life and no timer punishment. Dragging back over your own path shortens it, and pressing Escape on a PC cancels a trace before you lift.

How do hints and stars work in Wend?

You get 3 hints per puzzle. A hint lights up the starting cell of one word you have not found yet — the first letter of its true path, ringed in gold. Stars work like this: 3 stars for a finish with no hints and no wrong traces, 2 stars for a finish with at most 1 hint and at most 2 wrong traces, and 1 star for any other finish. There are 90 stars across the 30 set puzzles.

Is Wend free to play on mobile?

Yes. Wend is completely free and runs in your browser, so it works on phones, tablets and PCs with nothing to download and no account to create. Your stars, best times, Daily streak and even a half-finished puzzle are saved in your own browser and restored when you come back.

Last updated: November 8, 2026. Wend v1.0 — the first release of our original word-path puzzle game, with 30 set puzzles in three sizes, a Daily Wend drawn from a pool of 60, a 38,038-word checking dictionary, computer-proven unique solutions, start-cell hints, free lifting and undo, and star ratings. An original GameOLL browser game. Found a bug? Tell us in the comments and we will fix it in the next version.