How to Play

Press and drag across letters that touch each other — sideways, up and down, or diagonally. Letters must be adjacent, and you can't reuse the same tile twice in one word.

Drag back over the previous tile to undo a step. Lift your finger to submit the word.

The Qu tile counts as both letters at once, so tracing it spells "qu" in one step.

Words must be at least 3 letters on the small boards, or 4 letters on 5×5 and 6×6.

Turning the Board

Part-way into a round a Rotate button appears next to the timer. It turns the board a quarter turn so you can look at the same letters from a new angle — which is often all it takes to spot a word you'd stopped seeing. The letters stay the right way up.

Nothing about the board actually changes: same letters, same words, same score. In multiplayer only your own view turns — everyone else still sees the board exactly as it was. There's a short wait between turns, and the button steps aside for the final countdown.

Each size is its own game, with its own timer, minimum word length and level.

Boards are dealt from the real Boggle dice, so the letter mix is the same one the physical game uses.

6×6 uses the Super Big Boggle set, which has two unusual cubes. One carries two-letter faces — An, Er, He, In, Qu and Th — that count as both letters in one step, just like Qu. The other can land on a blocked square: no letter, and no word may pass through it. Roughly half of 6×6 boards have one.

Points come from word length, exactly as in classic Boggle:

One long word can be worth more than a dozen short ones — it's usually worth hunting for length once you've swept the easy finds.

Some boards include a single ★ tile. It stands in for any one letter.

You don't pick the letter — trace through it and it resolves by itself to whatever makes your path a real word. If more than one word fits, it prefers the one that isn't already spellable without it. The star only reveals what it became once the round ends.

How Often It Turns Up

It appears less often on the small boards, and that's deliberate: on a 3×3 there are only nine tiles, so one wild is a much bigger share of the board — and with the 3-letter minimum, a wild plus two real letters is already a word. Left at the same rate everywhere, it decided small-board rounds on its own.

Chance of a wild, per round

These are set so the wild is worth about the same on every board — rarer where it's powerful, more common where it's only a small help. There's never more than one on a board.

Solo Classic never gets one, on any board size. The wild belongs to Standard's bargain: trace anything long enough and it's accepted, with the star resolved for you. Classic checks each word as you trace it, so a wild there would only ever be a source of "why was that refused". Multiplayer always plays by Standard rules, so wilds appear there as normal.

Classic — the forgiving ruleset. Words are checked the moment you trace them: real words stick, anything else bounces back and costs you nothing. Your score only ever goes up, so you can guess freely.

Standard — paper-Boggle rules. Any trace of the right length is accepted with no hint as to whether it's real, exactly as if you'd written it on paper. At the end of the round every invalid word costs a flat −1, whatever its length. This is the ruleset multiplayer always uses.

In Standard you can tap the small × on a word chip during the round to retract one you're unsure about, before it's judged.

Because Classic lets you guess for free, it earns half the XP Standard does.

You have a separate level for each board size, so getting good at 4×4 doesn't quietly level your 6×6.

What a Finished Round Earns

• Finishing the round+5 to +20
• Each word found+1 to +12
• A word new to you+1 to +6
• Each coverage milestone+5
• Beating your best score+25
• Each invalid word (Standard)−1

Word XP rises with length, and the new-word bonus with it. Coverage pays out as you pass 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 33 and 50% of the board's words.

Then It's Multiplied

Bigger boards simply hold more words, so left alone they'd pay far more per minute. These pull every size to roughly the same rate, while still leaving the harder boards a small edge:

By board size By game mode

Classic earns half what Standard does. In Classic a wrong guess costs you nothing, so you can try anything that comes to mind — Standard makes every word a real commitment, and pays accordingly.

Levels get steadily longer — each costs about 10% more than the last. Level 10 is a few hours of play; level 20 is a serious commitment.

New words are the real engine. The game remembers every word you've ever found on each board size, and only pays the discovery bonus the first time. Hunting unfamiliar words beats re-tracing the same easy ones.

Ending a round before the timer runs out costs a little XP — −5 the first time in a day, then −10, then −20.

Some deliberate softeners:

• The first 15 seconds of any round are free, so a misclick or the wrong board size costs nothing.
• It can never drop you a level — your bar won't fall below where the current level began.
• At most three per board size per day; after that they're free.
• Joining a multiplayer round is always safe — leaving a solo round to play with friends is never penalised.

Finishing a round without finding a single word costs −5.

Each board size has its own live room. Open Multiplayer, hit Ready, and once two players are ready a round starts for everyone on a shared countdown — same board, same letters, same timer.

You can watch a room without joining — the live board and roster are visible while a round is running.

You can join a round as it starts and for a few seconds after. Once a round is properly under way, Join saves you a place in the next one instead and readies you up automatically the moment this one ends. Everyone in a round plays the same clock, which is what lets the scoreboard mean exactly what it looks like.

Scoring is judged across all players at the end:

• A valid word only you found — full points.
• A valid word someone else also found — 0 for both of you.
• An invalid word — −1 (−2 on 6×6).

So the winner is usually whoever found the words nobody else spotted, not whoever found the most.

Multiplayer always uses Standard rules. Tapping Home mid-round only pauses your view — nothing is submitted and you can tap back in. Quit is the one that leaves for good.

Every multiplayer round moves a rating — a measure of how you do against other players, kept separately for each board size. Everyone starts at 1000.

The Whole Rule

Finish above someone and you take rating from them. Finish below and you give some up. That's it — the scoreboard is the whole story.

• Finish 1st and your rating always goes up.
• Finish last and it always goes down.
• Beating a much stronger player is worth more; beating a much weaker one, very little.

Tap your rating on the results screen to see exactly which opponents it came from — the lines always add up to the number shown.

Rating Is Not Your Level

They measure different things and never mix. Your level is time invested and only ever goes up. Your rating is how you compare to everyone else right now, and it moves both ways.

Ranks

Everyone starts at 1000, which is an Apprentice — the ranks climb from there rather than sitting around your starting point. Archmage is meant to take most of a season of being the best player in the room; nobody should reach it in an afternoon.

Your First 5 Rounds

Your first 5 ranked rounds on each board are placement. They move your rating much further than normal, and further again on a win streak, so a strong start places you high straight away — a clean sweep can put you at Scribe immediately.

That's as far as placement reaches. Everything above Scribe is earned at the normal rate, and once placement is done your rating settles into the standard maths for good.

Getting on the Board

You appear on the leaderboard for a board once placement is finished. The leaderboard has a table per board size plus an Overall, weighted by how much you've actually played each size.

Go 30 days without a ranked round and you're hidden from the board — nothing is lost, and you're back the next time you play.

Seasons

Ranked runs in 10-week seasons. At each new season everyone's rating eases halfway back toward 1000, so the climb reopens instead of settling into a fixed order forever. Your best-ever rating is kept permanently, and finished seasons are recorded.

Tap any word you've found to see its definition and the path you traced. After a round, Show All Possible Words reveals everything the board held — a good way to pick up new vocabulary.

Definitions work offline. The app carries its own dictionary and only reaches the internet as a last resort.

Proper nouns, abbreviations and Roman numerals are recognised but score nothing. In Classic they're accepted at 0 points with a note; in Standard they count as invalid like anything else.

Think the word list is wrong? Open any word and use Request Review — green to propose adding a word the game rejected, red to report one that shouldn't be there. Approved additions go live for everyone.

You can play everything solo without an account, and you'll earn XP and level up normally — up to level 5 on each board size.

Signing in carries that progress straight over to your account and lifts the cap. It also puts you on the players list under your own name, syncs your settings across devices, and unlocks multiplayer.