WordWend™ — where word‑finds, crosswords, and trivia unite
Wend your way across the board by tracing adjacent letters to spell out the answer. Answers take many forms — a single word, a phrase, or a whole sentence — and run in any direction across the grid.
Basic Gameplay
Each Wend is a square grid of tiles. Above it sits a card naming the category and giving the hint. The answer always begins on the tile marked with the orange arrow , already lit green.
Drag your finger across neighboring tiles to trace the answer — up, down, or right (Wends never turn back to the left). Prefer to tap? Tap each next tile in turn. On a keyboard, the arrow keys move the head. The timer starts on your first move, so take your time reading the hint first.
Scoring
WordWend tracks three things: your time, your bonks (wrong steps), and the number of gusts of wind you asked for. They are counted separately — a bonk costs you nothing off the clock.
When two runs are compared, they are ranked in this order: fewest gusts first, then fewest bonks, and only then fastest time. A gust is help you asked for, so a run that took help never beats one that did without it, however quick it was; a clean run likewise beats a scruffy faster one. Time is the last word, not the first. Wend accurately and unaided — speed only settles a draw.
When you trace the final letter, the Wend is won and a panel slides up with the answer, its source, and your tally. Each solved puzzle is added to the day's progress below the board.
Tailwinds and Gusts
Stuck? Catch a tailwind. The Gust button sits in the row below the board. Tap it and a gust traces a stretch of the trail for you — the timer pauses while it blows, and each gust counts toward your tally. If you idle for a while, the button gently pulses and a “Stuck? Ask the wind…” note appears to remind you it is there. The wind never moves for you unless you ask.
The Daily Wend
Each day is a new stage on one endless journey — a fresh trail every morning. The categories rotate, so no two days walk the same ground. Finish today's trail and a shareable map of your run appears below the progress list: your trail across every board of the day, with bonks marked as little red X's. Tap Share Your Journey to send it to friends.
Realms and Journeys
Beyond The Daily Wend, tap the map button in the top bar to open Wend Journeys — a shelf of self-contained themed journeys grouped by realm. Each journey is an expedition-map card showing a little mountain; the moss trail on the card fills in as you complete camps, and a flag is planted on the peak once you finish.
Open a journey and it unfolds as a trail that climbs — the further you go, the harder the Wends, rising through The Meadows, The Foothills, The High Passes, and The Summit Ridge. Each waypoint is one camp. A green check marks camps you have wended, the pulsing orange waypoint is the one you can play now (“You are here”), and later camps stay dimmed until you reach them. The little bars under each waypoint show its difficulty. Wend every camp to plant your flag on the summit.
Wending a camp again
A camp you have reached can be wended as often as you like — open it and tap Wend again. Only your best run is kept, judged by the order above: fewest gusts, then fewest bonks, then fastest. A new run replaces the old one only if it beats it, so replaying can improve your record but never spoil it. Nothing is saved until the run is finished, and a run you abandon halfway leaves your record exactly as it was.
The camp also keeps a count of how many times you have wended it, shown beside the camp on the trail and on the recap when you arrive — ×3 means three finishes, whichever of them was your best.
The Daily Wend is the exception: it cannot be replayed. It is a single dated run that carries your streak, and it would mean rather less if you could keep trying until it looked good.
Your privacy
WordWend keeps almost nothing about you: no account, no name, no email. What it does record, and what it deliberately does not, is set out in full in the privacy policy.
WordWend is built on open-source work by others. Their licences are reproduced in full under acknowledgements.
Something wrong, or something to say? Support has the address and what to include.