Word Hunt — free word finding game, ninety seconds

Sixteen letters, ninety seconds, and one rule: drag through letters that touch each other — sideways, up and down, or diagonally — to spell a word. No letter can be used twice in the same word. Words must be at least four letters, and longer ones are worth disproportionately more, so a single six-letter find beats three separate fours.

Unlike a word search, you are not told what you are looking for and the path is allowed to turn corners, which makes this a hunt rather than a scan. Every grid is built around real words and then checked — the game plants several words along winding paths, fills the rest, and counts exactly how many words from its dictionary can be traced before dealing it, so the counter in the corner tells you how many are genuinely there. Free, instant, no download.

How to play

• Press and drag across touching letters to spell a word, then let go to submit.
• Letters must touch — including diagonally — and none can be reused within a word.
• Four letters minimum. Scoring is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 points for four, five, six, seven and eight letters.
• The counter shows how many words the grid actually contains, so you always know what is left.
• You have ninety seconds. Repeats do not score twice.

Why you should hunt the long word first

The scoring curve is the whole strategy. Four letters pays 1 and eight pays 8, so the value of a word grows much faster than its length. Two extra letters roughly triples what a word is worth. That means the instinct to hoover up every short word you can see is usually wrong — it burns the clock at the worst possible exchange rate, and the letters you spend are frequently the same ones a long word needed.

The practical method is to start from the awkward letters. Common letters appear everywhere and give you nothing to narrow down; a J, a K or a W usually belongs to exactly one word on the board, and finding where it can go often reveals that word immediately. The same applies to letter pairs: if you can see an ING, an ER or a TH sitting next to each other, trace outwards from the pair rather than scanning the grid square by square.

The last habit is to remember that paths may turn. Most people's eyes track straight lines because that is what word searches train, and a grid that looks empty along its rows and diagonals will often be full of words that zigzag. When you are stuck, pick a promising starting letter and physically drag around its neighbours — the movement finds words the eye skips. If you like the straight-line version instead, Word Search is here, and Word Scramble gives you the letters and asks for the anagram.

More games

More word games: Word Search, Word Scramble, Hangman and Daily Word. Or browse all games.