Word Search

Word Search is the puzzle from the back of a holiday activity book, drawn as a sheet of cream graph paper on a sunny desk. The letters are printed in fat rounded ink, the margins fill with little doodles that follow the theme, and every word you find gets a chunky highlighter stroke in its own colour, wobbly edge and dry streaks included. Drag from the first letter to the last, let go, and the chip on the list below is struck through.

Pick a theme from forty-six of them — animals, ocean, space, kitchen, castle, desert, breakfast — and a size to suit your patience. Easy is eight by eight with words running only left to right and top to bottom. Normal adds diagonals. Hard and Expert fill twelve and fourteen squares and hide words in all eight directions, backwards included. Every grid is built by hand by the game: the words are threaded together with a backtracking placer, the gaps are filled with letters drawn from the puzzle's own alphabet so nothing stands out, and the whole sheet is checked until each word can be found in exactly one place.

A clock runs while you hunt and your best time for each size is kept in your browser, along with the run of days you have finished a puzzle. Three hints a page will pulse the first letter of a word you have not spotted. There is a puzzle of the day too, the same theme, size and grid for everyone on that date, and any seed can be replayed exactly. Play it with a finger, with a mouse, or entirely from the keyboard: the arrows walk a cursor around the grid, space starts and ends a selection, H asks for a hint and N turns the page.