Hexaboo

Hexaboo is a word game where the board fights back. Letters sit in hexagons, you spell words by tapping adjacent tiles, and between words you can drag one tile onto a neighbour to swap them, which is how you manufacture a word that is not there yet. Every turn spawns a new letter into the board, so the space you free by playing a word is quietly refilled. That gives the game a shape closer to a falling-block puzzle than to a word search: the daily ends when the letters run out, and the endless run ends when the board fills up.

1. Pick a run on the front page: the dated Daily Hexaboo, the dated Daily Mini-Boo, or Endless Hexaboo.
2. Tap adjacent letters to spell a word of at least four letters.
3. Submit with the Submit button or the spacebar, or wipe the selection with Clear.
4. Drag a tile onto an adjacent tile to swap the two when the board has no word in it worth playing.
5. Use Pass to take a turn without swapping, and lean on the Hint button when the board looks dead.

Most word games hand you a fixed set of letters and ask what you can see in it. Hexaboo hands you a set you are allowed to rebuild, and then charges you a turn every time you do, which turns each move into a trade between the word available now and the better word two swaps away. The spawning letter is what keeps the pressure on, since the board you tidied is never the board you get back, and the running count of available words is a genuinely clever readout, telling you when a position has run dry without telling you a single word.

The header is the scoreboard: score, turn number and a per-turn rate, plus a letters-left readout. The line under the buttons is the one to watch, though, because it tells you how many words the current board can still make, so a board showing a single available word is a board asking to be swapped rather than played. Nothing marks a word right or wrong in the Wordle sense; the cost of a bad turn is a letter spawned and a board grown more crowded.

Daily Hexaboo

The dated main puzzle, ending when the day's supply of letters runs out.

Daily Mini-Boo

A second dated puzzle listed alongside it, tracked separately on the front page.

Endless Hexaboo

An anytime run listed under ANYTIME, which the rules say ends when the board fills up.

• Four letters is the floor, so a hex full of two- and three-letter fragments is not a bad board, it is a board that needs a swap.
• Passing is not free. A letter spawns each turn, whether you spell a word or take the Pass.
• The words-available line is a warning system. Watch it fall toward one and start rearranging before the board has nothing left in it.
• Swapping is the real skill. Because the swap is between adjacent tiles, a letter three hexes from where you need it costs several turns to bring home, so plan the route rather than the word.