How to play Word Weave

Word Weave is a tracing puzzle where the entire grid is the answer. Six columns by eight rows of letters, and every one of those forty-eight letters belongs to exactly one hidden word. There is no filler at all.

What you are told

The theme, and nothing else. No word list, no lengths, no count.

That is a much stronger clue than it sounds, because it tells you what kind of words are in there — and because one of the answers names the theme outright.

Tracing

Trace a word by moving through squares that touch: sideways, up and down, or diagonally. A path may bend as often as it likes and cut across in any direction, but it may never use the same square twice.

Because there is no filler, every square you have not used is still part of an answer you have not found. That is the most useful fact in the game: the grid tells you exactly how much is left and roughly where it is.

The spanner

One answer is the spanner. It names or sums up the theme, and it reaches all the way from one edge of the grid to the opposite edge.

When you find it, it is drawn as a distinct woven ribbon so you always know which one it was.

The spanner is worth hunting deliberately rather than stumbling into. Because it must touch two opposite edges, it is long, and because it is long it consumes a great many squares — finding it early collapses the rest of the puzzle.

How hint credits work

Any other real word of four letters or more that you spot in the grid — one that is not part of the answer set — earns a hint credit. Three credits outline one answer's location without naming it.

This is a nicely judged trade: the incidental words you notice while hunting are not wasted, but converting them into help costs three finds, so the hint system rewards looking rather than guessing.

How to work the grid

Start from the leftover shapes rather than from the middle. Once a few answers are traced, the unused squares form islands, and an island of six squares is a six-letter word whose letters you can see all of.

Look at the corners and edges early. Corner letters have the fewest neighbours — only three — so they have the fewest possible paths running through them and are the most constrained squares on the board.

Unusual letters are anchors. A J, Q, X, Z or W narrows things immediately, because only a handful of words contain them and their neighbours must fit.

And keep the theme in mind constantly. If the theme is Weather and you have an unused island containing T, S, F, R, O and an M, you are looking at a word like FROSTS long before you have traced it.