Puzzles for iPhone and iPad
Word Search, Sudoku, and Solitaire — plus a fresh puzzle every single day.
Somewhere to put your attention for ten quiet minutes. No account to set up, no ads waiting to break your concentration, and nothing locked behind a purchase. Open it, play, and come away a little lighter than you went in.
Trace the words and watch a plain gray grid fill up with color.
Nine digits, one way they all fit — and a nudge that explains itself whenever you want one.
The one you already know, dealt so that it can always be won.
Three games, side by side. Star the one you keep coming back to and it moves to the front. In the mood for words today rather than numbers? Tap a filter and the shelf narrows to match.
The daily puzzle sits above them all, because on any given morning it could turn out to be any of them.
Every day
A small ritual worth keeping. It’s ready before your coffee is, it takes a few minutes, and tomorrow there’ll be another one waiting. Some mornings it’s a word search on a topic you’ve never seen. Some mornings it’s a hand of solitaire.
The card tells you the game, the topic, and roughly how hard it’s going to be, so you can decide whether you have time for it right now. Today it’s Kitchen Gear — and there are forty more topics like it that only ever show up here.
Enjoyed it? Send the very same board to a friend with a short code. They get your puzzle, not one that’s merely similar.
Play three days in a row and you’ve earned yourself a lifeline. Keep it going and there’s another every week, and a handful every month. It’s a gentle reason to come back rather than a guilt trip — miss a day and the count simply starts again. Nothing you’ve already earned goes anywhere.
Daily scores are kept in their own place, so one brilliant Tuesday doesn’t quietly own your record forever.
Words
Pick your pace. On Easy the words sit straight and neat, and you can find them with half your mind somewhere else. On Hard they run backward, cut across diagonals, and hide inside one another — and somehow an hour is gone.
Drag a finger across the letters, or tap the first one and the last one. Whichever is comfortable — nobody’s testing your dexterity here.
Every word you find keeps its own color for the rest of the game, which is why a busy board never turns to mush. It’s quietly satisfying to watch a gray grid of letters fill up with color as you go.
Words are worth a little more the sooner you spot them, and longer ones are worth more than short ones. But nothing drains away while you think, and you’re never punished for taking your time.
Spot a real word that wasn’t even on the list? That counts too. Find enough of them and they’ll earn you a lifeline.
The one that isn’t relaxing
Everything above is a calm scan. This is a chase. Every so often the whole board picks itself up and rearranges — the word you were three letters into is somewhere else now, and you have to find it all over again. It’s quick, it’s a little bit unfair, and it’s the one people keep coming back for.
The board only shows you the part you’re actually looking at. You sweep the fog around with a finger and hope you’re pointing somewhere useful.
Three of the words on your list were never hidden anywhere at all. Figuring out which three is its own kind of fun.
Guess wrong and it costs you. Suddenly you’re checking twice before you commit, and the whole board feels different.
All three are switched on the first time you try it, and every one of them has a switch. Turn them all off and it’s still a board that won’t sit still — that part is the mode itself.
There’s a hint made just for this, too. Freeze holds everything in place for twenty seconds, which is exactly as much relief as it sounds like.
Chaos is the one game the app won’t save for later. You start it and you either finish it or you don’t — which is a good part of why it feels the way it does.
| Level | Grid | Words | Letters | What you’re up against |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 10 × 10 | 8 | 3–6 | Straight across and down, always forward. Nothing is trying to trick you. |
| Medium | 14 × 14 | 11 | 5–9 | Diagonals show up, some words read backward, and they start crossing each other. |
| Hard | 18 × 18 | 15 | 2–12 | All eight directions, mostly backward, with lookalike letters and a few planted near-misses. |
| Chaos | 18 × 18 | 18 | 2–12 | Everything Hard does, twice as sneaky — on a board that refuses to sit still. |
Animals, Nature, Cities, Sports, Countries, and Food to choose from — plus forty-one more that only ever show up in the daily puzzle, so there’s always something new waiting.
Classic
Most sudoku counts how many squares it left blank and calls that the difficulty. This one asks a better question: what will you actually have to figure out? Every board is rated by the hardest bit of thinking it needs — so Easy really is easy, and Expert really will teach you something.
Ask for help and you don’t get a number dropped into a square. You get the reason, in a plain sentence, with the squares it depends on lit up. Read it, see it, then place the digit yourself — that’s how it sticks.
It won’t spring anything on you, either. Pick Easy and the reasoning stays easy; the app isn’t going to start talking about X-Wings out of nowhere.
Pencil in what a square could still be. Cross off what it definitely isn’t. Or pick a digit and light up everywhere on the board it lives, or could live.
And if you’d rather not fill in every note by hand, the app will do it for you so you can get straight to the interesting part.
There’s a whole guide built in: four pages on reading a grid and taking notes, then twelve on the techniques themselves, from the simplest one up to the ones that make you feel clever.
Nothing is explained in the abstract. Each lesson plays out on a real board, a step at a time, with a slider you can drag back and forth until it clicks.
| Level | What you’ll be working with | What that feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | Singles | There’s always a square with only one answer left in it. Fill it, and the next one appears. |
| Medium | Pairs | Two squares that between them own two digits — so nothing else nearby can have either. |
| Hard | Intersections and triples | “This digit has to be somewhere along here.” One idea, read in two directions. |
| Expert | X-Wing, Swordfish, XY-Wing, XYZ-Wing | Patterns stretched across the whole grid. This is the good stuff. |
Its own set, kept apart from word search. Finish boards, finish them quickly, and finally finish one at that level you’ve been avoiding.
Classic
Draw one, build up by suit, exactly the way you remember it. The difference is that the app has already figured out whether this hand can be won — so when it doesn’t go your way, that’s on you, and there’s something oddly satisfying about knowing it.
Switch it on and no hand reaches the table until there’s a way through it. No more twenty minutes lost to a deal that was dead from the very first card.
Prefer to take your chances? Turn it off and play whatever the shuffle gives you.
When there’s a clear path to the win, the hint hands you the next move along it and tells you so. When it isn’t certain, it says that instead — because “this looks promising” and “this wins” are very different things, and it won’t pretend otherwise.
And if the game genuinely can’t be won anymore, it tells you, rather than letting you shuffle through the deck forever, hoping.
Modern is the default, and it only ever goes up: points for cards sent home, cards turned over, and columns cleared. Nothing drains away while you sit and think about it.
Or pick Klondike for the old desktop scoring you probably grew up with — ticking clock, deck penalty and all. Games are filed separately by which one you used, so your records never get mixed up.
| Scoring | What earns you points | What costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Modern Default | Cards sent home, cards turned over, columns cleared. | Hints, and nothing else. The score never falls on its own. |
| Klondike | Ten for a card sent home, five for a card turned over. | Two every ten seconds, and a hundred each time you go back through the deck. |
Earned as you play
Hints are paid for in lifelines, and you earn those by playing. No ad to sit through, no timer counting down until you’re allowed another one. If you’d rather not wait, there’s a small shop tucked away with a few packs to buy, but nothing in the game ever needs it.
The cheap ones narrow things down without spoiling it — light up the quarter of the board where something is hiding, or every letter of your choosing. The expensive one simply finds the word for you, and you get no points at all for it.
That’s the trade, and it’s entirely yours to make.
| Hint | Cost | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Quadrant | 1 | Lights up the quarter of the board where a word you haven’t found is hiding. |
| Letter Hunt | 1 | Pick a letter and every one of them glows. |
| First Letter | 2 | Shows you where a word begins. Which way it runs is still your problem. |
| Freeze Chaos only | 2 | Holds the board still for twenty seconds. Blessed relief. |
| Reveal | 3 | Just finds a word for you. You get nothing for it, and sometimes that’s fine. |
Good to know
The things that don’t show up in a screenshot: how it sounds, how it behaves once you’ve turned your accessibility settings up, and what it does — and doesn’t — do with anything about you.
On a phone the word list sits under the board. On an iPad it moves alongside, so you can take in everything at once. Sudoku, solitaire, and the results screens all rearrange the same way, and the board always gets first claim on the space.
Portrait, landscape, phone, tablet — none of them is a squeezed version of another.
Screens
The full picture, if you’d rather just see it all.
