LinkedIn - Wend

Wend opens on a five-by-five grid in which a few solid gray blocks replace letters, one two squares wide, another three. Beneath the grid, a stack of empty templates of increasing lengths shows the words to find and the exact number of squares for each. The page describes the concept like this: connect letters in the grid to reveal hidden words, with a new puzzle each day. A timer runs at the top of the screen next to a Reset button and a Preferences menu, the day’s puzzle shows its number, and two collapsible panels remain under the grid for the whole game: How to play and Keyboard controls.

1. Open the game page and click Start a game: the grid replaces the home screen and the timer starts with it.
2. Connect letters in the grid to form a hidden word, going around the solid gray blocks, which span multiple squares and carry no letters.
3. Use the templates under the grid as a roadmap: they show how many words to find and the length of each, from shortest to longest.
4. Below the grid there are two buttons, Undo and Hint. Undo stays disabled as long as no letter is selected, while Hint is clickable from the first second.

Wend is a word game tucked away on a professional network, and that unlikely address is part of the pleasure. The grid is tiny, five by five, but the gray blocks that cut into it force you to look for letter paths instead of sweeping across lines, and the templates lined up below turn the game into a shopping list: you know exactly how many words remain and how long each is, without knowing where to grab them.

What the screen reliably shows is a board that starts partly inactive, with the Undo button greyed out as long as no letter is selected, while Hint is clickable from the first second. The only counter shown is the timer in the top bar, which runs as soon as the grid opens, and the empty templates under the board serve as the dashboard of what remains to be filled.

Daily game

LinkedIn presents Wend in its Games hub as one of its daily puzzle games, described as “Weave through words”.

• Read the templates before touching the board. Knowing that you’re looking for words of different lengths, and which lengths they are, directs the eye very differently than blind searching.
• Two buttons not to confuse because they’re not in the same place: Undo is under the grid, Reset is up top beside the timer.