Question 1

How do you play Squares?

Accepted Answer

Find words in the grid by moving from one letter to a touching one — sideways, up and down, or diagonally. Press a letter and drag across its neighbours, and the word is whatever you traced. Four letters minimum.

Question 2

Is this free? Do I need an account?

Accepted Answer

Free, no account, no download, and unlimited — there is no one-a-day wait here.

Question 3

Can I use the same square twice in one word?

Accepted Answer

No. Each square can appear once per word, though you can use it again in a different word. That is the rule that stops "banana" being findable from one A.

Question 4

Do the letters have to touch?

Accepted Answer

Yes, including diagonally — every square has three, five or eight neighbours depending on where it sits. While you are tracing, the squares you could move to next are outlined, because the rule is invisible otherwise and being silently refused feels like a bug.

Question 5

Can I tap instead of dragging?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Tap the letters in order and tap the last one again to submit. Dragging is the natural gesture and both do exactly the same thing.

Question 6

What happens if I overshoot while dragging?

Accepted Answer

Drag back onto the previous letter and the last step is undone. It is what everybody tries first, so it works.

Question 7

How is scoring done?

Accepted Answer

By length, steeply: four letters is one point, five is two, six is three, seven is five and eight or more is eleven. Long words are worth far more than several short ones, because the short ones are the ones you find by accident.

Question 8

What is the QU square?

Accepted Answer

One square holding both letters, exactly as on the physical dice. Q is almost never useful alone in English, so pairing it is what makes the letter playable at all.

Question 9

Where do the boards come from?

Accepted Answer

They are rolled from the standard sixteen Boggle dice — not a uniform spread of letters, which produces boards that look plausible and play terribly. The real distribution puts vowels where they are needed.

Question 10

Are the boards checked before they are used?

Accepted Answer

Yes, exhaustively. Every board is solved at build time and only kept if it holds between 25 and 120 findable words with at least one of six letters or more. A board with sixty four-letter words and nothing longer is busywork, so it is thrown away.

Question 11

How do you know how many words are left?

Accepted Answer

Because the full answer list is computed in advance for every board. The counter is not an estimate — the game knows exactly what is findable.

Question 12

Why was my word rejected?

Accepted Answer

Either the squares do not touch, it is under four letters, you have already found it, or it is not on this board’s list. The message says which, and it names the path problem first — "letters must touch" is more useful than "not a word" for letters that do spell something.

Question 13

Why is a real word not accepted?

Accepted Answer

The word list is curated to words people know rather than taken from a raw dictionary, so a few genuine but obscure words are missed. The alternative is a list full of archaic forms, which is worse: you would be told that "stolenly" was worth three points.

Question 14

Is there a time limit?

Accepted Answer

No. Classic Boggle uses a three-minute timer; this does not, because a puzzle you can put down and come back to is a better fit for a browser than a race.

Question 15

What is a good strategy?

Accepted Answer

Hunt the endings. Find where -ING, -ED and -ER can be traced and work backwards, because those three account for a large share of the longer words on most boards. Corners are worth checking early — they have only three neighbours, so words through them are rare and easy to miss.

Question 16

Should I look for long words first?

Accepted Answer

Yes, while the grid is unfamiliar. Long words are worth several short ones and are much harder to spot once your eye has settled into a pattern.

Question 17

Does it work on a phone?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and tracing is the point on a phone — a finger drag across the grid is the whole input. The grid keeps a square aspect and the letters stay large.

Question 18

Can I replay the same puzzle?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every puzzle has a number and the same number always produces the same puzzle, so you can hand somebody the link and compare.

Question 19

How is this different from Spell Bee?

Accepted Answer

Spell Bee gives you seven letters to use in any order and as often as you like; here the letters are fixed in place and the path between them is the constraint. One is an anagram problem, the other is a maze.

Question 20

Are proper nouns allowed?

Accepted Answer

No — the list is ordinary words only.

Question 21

Where does the game come from?

Accepted Answer

Boggle, designed by Allan Turoff and published by Parker Brothers in 1972. The dice distribution here is the original one.