The rules of wordsearch

A wordsearch is a grid of letters with a list of words next to it. Each word is hidden somewhere inside the grid, running in a straight line. Find every word and you've solved the puzzle.

That is the whole game.

Words can sit in any of eight directions: across left-to-right, across right-to-left, down, up, or one of the four diagonals. The classic newspaper variety often skips the harder ones — left-to-right and down only — but the family allows all eight, and our medium and hard tiers turn them on.

The letters around each placed word are filler. They sit there to make the placed words harder to spot — without them, a word would be a straight line of useful letters against a sea of empty cells, and you'd see it from across the room. Good wordsearch construction matches the filler letters to the theme: a grid built around tropical fruits leans on the letters those words contain (more A and O, less Z and X), so a filler patch reads visually like the placed words and the eye has to work for it. A grid built with uniform random letters reads cheap.

A word counts as found when you trace it in the order it's spelled. Start at the F of FIG, drag through the I, end at the G — that's a commit. The constructor may have placed FIG running in any of the eight directions the grid allows, so the F could be in any cell with the I one step away on one of those axes. What doesn't change is the direction your trace has to go: whichever way spells the word forward. The same line of cells traced backwards spells GIF, and GIF isn't on the list. Found words stay highlighted on the grid so you can see the picture filling in.

The puzzle is done when every word from the list is found. Nothing else happens at the bottom — no boss fight, no scoreboard. The picture is just the highlighted words in the grid, the unhighlighted filler around them, and the time you spent.

Sizes run from a quick 8×8 (sometimes a kids' tier) up through 12×12, 15×15, and 20×20, with a non-square 20×30 at the top — closer to twenty words to find on the biggest grid at the hardest tier. The bread-and-butter size is around 12×12: a fifteen-minute solve, enough room for a dozen words to hide in. Bigger grids tilt the experience toward "calm afternoon"; smaller grids fit a bus ride. We allow placed words to overlap one another at medium and hard — TREE and ELM both sharing the E — because it tightens the grid and feels constructed. At easy we keep words apart so the eye has fewer false leads. The rule that holds across every tier is the same: every word from the list appears in a straight line, and you've solved the puzzle when you've found every one.