Honeycomb

Honeycomb is played a few centimetres from the wall of a beehive. Golden cells fill the screen, some capped in pale wax, some brimming with honey that runs down into the cell below, all of it lit by the shaft of daylight coming in from the entrance overhead. Seven of those cells hold letters: six in plain wax around the outside, and one in the middle that glows amber and has to appear in every word you make. Tap the cells or type, and the word forms above the comb; press Enter and a bee in tiny goggles carries it off to the edge of the comb and caps it into the wall.

A four-letter word is worth a point and anything longer is worth its length, so the long ones are where the honey is. A word that uses all seven letters is a pangram: the hive sounds a fanfare, the crew parades across the comb and you take another seven points on top. Every comb has at least one. As the points come in you climb a ladder of eight ranks, from Larva through Forager and Wax Builder up to Queen, with the queen herself watching from her throne cell at the side of the wall. Shuffle the outer cells when you get stuck, and there are three hints on every comb if you need the first two letters of something you have missed.

There is one Daily Comb, the same for everybody on the date, with a run of days kept for as long as you keep coming back. Free Play deals new combs for as long as you like, at three sizes. Timed gives you three minutes to take as many points as you can, and Pass and play sits two people at the same comb, taking turns, each word scoring for whoever found it. The word list was written for this game: six and a half thousand everyday words of four to nine letters, nothing obscure and nothing you would have to look up. Your run of days, your best rank and your best timed score are kept in your browser and nowhere else.