How to play Meander
Meander is a word-finding game on a 4 by 4 grid of letters. A word is a path through letters that touch, up, down, sideways or diagonally, using each letter once, and every board holds dozens of them. Find as many as you can: longer words are worth far more, and your rank climbs with your share of everything the board holds. There is no clock, and you can type a word instead of tracing it. The Daily gives everyone the same grid; Practice deals a fresh one whenever you like.
How to play
- A word is a path through letters that touch, up, down, sideways or diagonally, using each letter once.
- Trace a path by tapping the letters in order, or drag across them, then add the word. On a keyboard, arrow to a letter and press Enter to add it.
- Or just type a word into the box: if it can be traced on the board, it counts.
- A word needs at least three letters. Longer words are worth far more: 3 letters score 1, 4 score 2, 5 score 4, 6 score 7, 7 score 11 and 8 score 15.
- Your rank climbs with your share of everything the board holds, from Setting out through Roaming to Pathfinder, and Every last one if you find them all.
- There is no clock. Press Finish when you are done; the round also ends by itself when every word has been found. Afterwards you see every word the board held, with yours marked.
Tips & strategy
- Length is everything. One six-letter word is worth seven three-letter ones, so once you have warmed up, hunt for the long ones.
- Grow the words you already have. Look for a letter touching the end of a found word, such as an S, a D or an R, or one touching its start, and a new word is one letter away.
- Common endings are worth checking: plurals and forms such as -ED, -ER and -ING count whenever they are ordinary words.
- Read the grid as rows as well as tracing it. Seeing the letters as a list often brings a word to mind before you have found its path, and then you can simply type it.
- Finish is final on the Daily and there is no clock, so there is never a reason to press it while words are still coming.
Accessibility
Typing is a complete way to play: type a word and the game finds its path, so you never have to trace the grid. "The board in words" reads the letters row by row, the current path and every word you have found are written out, and each word you add is announced with its points. On a keyboard the board is a single stop (the arrow keys move and Enter adds a letter), and each letter says its row, its column and, once chosen, its place in the path. A letter in the path shows its number as well as a highlight, and Finish asks you to confirm on the page before it ends the round.