How to play Letter Loop

Letter Loop is a letter-chain puzzle. Twelve letters sit three to a side around a square, and you build words by hopping from letter to letter.

The one rule that shapes everything

Two letters in a row may never come from the same side of the square.

Every letter you pick must come from a different side than the one before it. That single constraint is the puzzle: it means you cannot simply spell any word you can see, and it makes some perfectly ordinary words impossible while making odd ones easy.

Words must be at least three letters long.

Chaining

Each new word must begin with the last letter of the previous word, so the whole solve is one unbroken chain.

This is why the puzzle is not simply "find some words". A word that uses four unused letters is worth much less if it ends on a letter with nothing good to follow it. Where a word finishes matters as much as which letters it consumes.

Winning

You are not trying to make the most words. You win the moment all twelve letters have been used at least once, and the target is to do it in five words or fewer.

Going over the target is allowed — the puzzle simply reports how many words it took. There is no failure state and no penalty, so an inelegant solve is still a solve.

Used letters are filled in and marked, so what remains is always visible.

How to actually solve it

The instinct is to find the longest word you can and play it. That is usually wrong, because a long word often consumes letters that were easy to place anyway and leaves the awkward ones stranded.

Work backwards from the difficult letters instead. Find the two or three letters that will be hardest to use — the rare consonants, or letters whose neighbours are all on the same side as their natural partners — and build a word that uses them early, while you still have freedom.

Then think about endings. Before committing to a word, look at what letter it finishes on and whether any of the remaining letters can follow it under the side rule. Ending on a letter whose only continuations are on its own side is how a promising solve dies.

The five-word target is generous enough that you do not need brilliance, only planning: roughly two or three fresh letters a word gets you there.

How the daily loop is built

One shared puzzle per day, unlocking at midnight, with a streak for consecutive days.

Every letter you choose draws a line across the square, so the shape of your solve is visible as you build it — long diagonals when a word is doing a lot of work, short hops when it is not.