Letter Drop

You start with a five-letter word. Each round you drop some of its letters down into the next word and add one more, making a word one letter shorter, until you are down to a single letter.

Dropping is not discarding. The letters you drop are the letters you take with you. Everything you leave behind is gone. The board shows it: letters that dropped turn grey with an arrow under them, and the ones left behind fade away.

1. 5 → 4 Drop three letters in a row, then add one.
2. 4 → 3 Drop two letters in a row, then add one.
3. 3 → 2 Drop one letter, then add one.
4. 2 → 1 If your two-letter word holds an A or an I, that letter drops on its own and the run is done. A and I are the only one-letter words.

Two rules

• The letters you drop land side by side and in the same order, so the letter you add goes on one end, never in the middle.
• Every letter you add must be one you have not used yet. Anything already on the board, the opening word included, is greyed out on the keyboard.

Taking a turn

Tap the letters you want to take down. They drop as soon as you have enough of them. Type a letter, tap the empty slot at either end (or use the arrow keys) to choose which end it lands on, then tap the green check.

Words come from NWL2023, the list used for tournament Scrabble in North America, so a few odd ones are legal. Every word on the board has a book beside it: tap that for the meaning, and again to put it away.

Scoring

• 2 points for every word you make.
• 1, 2 or 3 points for the letter it brings in, depending on how awkward that letter is to use. The small number in the corner of each key says which, the way a Scrabble tile does, and the letter carries it onto the board once you play it. The last round adds no letter of its own, so it is worth 2.
• 3 points for getting all the way down to a single letter. Stop short and you lose them, so the expensive letter is not always worth taking.
• Three wrong guesses and you are out. Offering something that is not a word costs you a strike, and the third ends the game where it stands. Fishing for a two-letter word is not free.
• Undo costs 1 point once there is a word to take back. Backing out of a split you have not committed is free, and your score never goes below zero.

Every deal has its own best possible score, shown beside your running total from the start, along with how many different runs reach it. There are usually dozens, so the one the game shows you afterwards is rarely the one you found. Match that score and the game says so: a perfect run means nobody could have done better on your deal. Reaching it is a balance: the awkward letters pay more, but taking one without a route to the bottom costs you the finish, and a bad split can leave you with nothing to make at all. When a game ends you can reveal a run that scored the lot, to see what you missed. You can also give up part way through, which keeps the points you have and shows you the rest. Either way, looking closes that game: Undo stops working, so being stuck is a real choice between paying for another go and giving up to see how it was done.

The one thing to plan for

You cannot reach a single letter unless your two-letter word contains an A or an I, because those are the only one-letter words. So work out early where that letter is coming from. A and I obey the same rule as every other letter: once one is on the board it can only be dropped down, never added again. If your opening word already contains an A or an I, choose the splits that carry it all the way. If it contains neither, keep one of them unspent for the last round.

Levels

The slider at the top picks how hard a word you are dealt. Every opening word is graded when the game is built. On Easy deals the obvious play, taking the most valuable letter you can, is also the best play. On Tricky ones it is not, and going for the fat letter will usually strand you. Fiendish deals are those whose best runs go through words most people have never met.

Hints

Turn Hints on and every letter that makes a word from where you stand gets a green ring. It is there to learn with, so a run played with hints on counts as practice and cannot be shared.