A grid of letters hides words inside it, and you find them by swiping or tapping across connected letters. Trace a real word and it locks in. Beyond the target words there are bonus words to discover — extra finds the puzzle didn't ask for but rewards anyway — so a sharp eye is worth real points. It's the word search you remember, with a reason to keep hunting past the obvious.
A fresh daily puzzle lands each midnight. Send a friend the same grid with the challenge link.
Longer trails are worth the risk — a six-letter find outscores a fistful of threes, so the discipline is refusing the obvious small words while the timer argues with you. Found words lock in and the daily grid is identical for every player, which keeps the comparisons honest. Anagram Rush flips the format: one word at a time, letters scrambled, clock in charge.
Word Hunt's entire strategy lives in one curve, and I want to show it to you plainly because most players never look at it: length scoring is super-linear. A six-letter word isn't worth twice a three-letter word — it's worth more than several threes put together. The value of a word accelerates as it grows, deliberately and steeply. That curve is the game's whole opinion about what skill means on this board, so let me explain exactly why I tuned it that way.
A flat or linear curve rewards spamming: swipe CAT, swipe TEA, swipe EAT, swipe ATE — fingers moving constantly, brain barely engaged, score ticking up like a taxi meter. It looks like playing. It's really just typing. But the skill this game exists to train is board-reading: seeing that the letters for STRANGE are all sitting there, connected, waiting for the one player patient enough to trace the path. A super-linear curve makes that patience mathematically correct. The player who spends ten seconds finding one long word beats the player who spent the same ten seconds harvesting a basket of threes — not sometimes, reliably, by design. The scoring is the coaching.
Which brings us to the mistake, and it's the most predictable one in the whole catalog because time pressure manufactures it fresh in every player: under the clock, people swipe every three-letter word they can see. The countdown starts, adrenaline says MOVE, and the hands obey by grabbing the small stuff — it feels safe, it feels productive, points are visibly appearing. But run the arithmetic once: the same seconds spent tracing one long word out-score a dozen threes. Every three-letter swipe carries an invisible price tag — the long word you weren't looking for while your fingers were busy feeling useful.
So invert the instinct: scan for length FIRST. When the board appears, resist swiping anything at all for the opening seconds. Read the letter distribution — the clusters of friendly consonants, the S that pluralises everything it touches, the ING or ER that extends a good word into a great one. Hunt the five-plus words while your mind is fresh and the board is unexplored, bank those, and only then sweep up the short words with whatever time remains. Short words are the dessert, never the meal. And here's the compounding trick: long words usually contain their own shorter words along the same path — find STRANGE and you've also located RANGE and RAN on the way. Length-first play discovers the threes for free; threes-first play never discovers the STRANGEs at all.
The daily board lands at midnight, same grid for everyone, so the gap between spammers and readers stays honest and public. Read first. Swipe second. The curve is on your side the moment you decide to be on its.
Don't hunt for whole words — hunt for letter pairs. Your eye is much faster at spotting an unusual two-letter combination than a full word, so I scan for distinctive starts and clusters — "qu", "th", "ing", a lone "z" or "x" — and check what grows out of them. Anchoring on rare letters finds words you'd skim right past looking for the whole thing at once.
And don't stop at the list. The bonus words are where the score separates good players from quick ones, so after I've cleared the targets I sweep the grid again specifically for anything extra — short words branching off letters I've already used, words running backwards or diagonally. The targets are the floor; the bonus hunt is where you actually rack up points. Slow down and squeeze the grid before you call it done.
Word Hunt sharpens two things together: the visual scanning that finds patterns in a noisy field, and the vocabulary recall that turns a cluster of letters into a word you know. The bonus words reward seeing what isn't pointed out to you. Word Hunt takes me right back — it was one of the earliest puzzles I played, hunched over a grid with my cousins growing up. A word finder was the kind of thing that could keep a whole group of friends engrossed for an afternoon, no screens required. That's part of why I built it: a good word hunt is quiet, social, and quietly sharpening your eye the whole time — teaching you to spot the word, and the detail, that everyone else walks right past.
That combination — fast eyes plus a deep word store — is genuinely useful, and the bonus hunt trains you to look harder than the task strictly requires, which is a good habit in anything. No download, no sign-up — play in your browser on any device. If you like word games, try Anagram Rush next.