About Pathwords (pathwords.co)

This product

A Pathwords board is a grid of letters. You trace a path through tiles that touch — eight ways, including diagonally — and you keep going until every listed word is found. The game is untimed. You can drag, tap, or type. Progress lives in this browser.

Three sizes ship together. Mini is 3×3 with a three-letter minimum, a short board for a short sitting. Classic is 4×4, the default, with a four-letter minimum. Mega is 5×5, still a four-letter minimum, with a longer list and more ground to cover. Kids is a Settings toggle, not a separate site: it loads an easier Classic or Mini lexicon and its own streaks. Mega is not filtered by that toggle. The default audience is general, not child-directed.

The shape of a day is deliberate. Mini exists so a few minutes still feel like a finished puzzle. Classic is the habit most people open first. Mega is for when you want more room without learning a second game. Switching modes from the header does not change the adjacency rule: corners still count, and a tile still cannot be used twice in the same word.

Scoring splits English into two pots. Listed words pay two points a letter and are the only words that move your rank — Start, Good, Great, Awesome, Genius. Bonus words pay one point a letter, sit beside the rank, and count toward a fifth star. Hints point at listed words you have not found. Letter-count assist, from 40% of the board’s listed points, can overlay how many unfound listed words still start on each tile. Rotate is visual only. Speed Streak doubles fast finds for a short stretch without changing the Genius threshold. The full rules live on How to play; this page is the product story around them.

Play, the archive, and the three free hints on each board are free. House banners inside the play screen are house creatives. The indexable web privacy policy is at /privacy.

Pathwords is a puzzle, not a brain-training program. Other sites use “brain games” for memory drills and multi-game hubs; this page is one daily letter-path board — for enjoyment and engagement, without medical outcome claims.

Who makes it

Pathwords is published independently as Pathwords. It is a small, independent web game. There is no studio logo on the board and no parent company behind the word list. Questions about the site, including privacy, go to privacy@pathwords.co.

Independence is a fact of the work, not a slogan. Every string, icon, board, and puzzle on this site was produced for Pathwords. The game is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from any other word-path product. The attributions screen in the app credits the public word list and the typefaces; this page is the human one.

That smallness shows up in product choices you can feel. There is no account wall on play. Progress stays in the browser you opened. The archive is free rather than locked behind a signup. When something about privacy or a correction needs a human answer, the address above is the door — not a ticket queue with a product manager three layers up.

How the boards are built

Validation uses ENABLE, the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon, which is in the public domain. A generator proposes grids; the engine then checks that every listed word is actually reachable on that grid, so the game can never tell you a required word is invalid. Difficulty scoring and the split between required words and bonus words use published English word-frequency rankings from open corpora. Frequency is an ordering signal only — we do not redistribute the frequency data.

After the machine pass, boards are hand-capped for obscurity. A rare ENABLE entry that happens to sit on the grid does not automatically become a listed word. The aim is a list you can finish in one sitting without a specialist dictionary, with bonus words left for people who want to keep looking. Kids boards use a tighter lexicon aimed at ages five to eight and omit the Word of the Day. Mega is built from the same pipeline as Classic, on a 5×5, and is not given a kids variant.

The pipeline, in order:

1. Generate. A machine proposes nine, sixteen, or twenty-five letters that look able to support a daily — vowels placed so everyday words can walk, common consonants present, an eight-way graph underneath.
2. Prove reachability. Every candidate is a simple path on that graph, at or above the mode’s minimum length, whose letters spell an ENABLE token. Listed words are chosen later; before they ship, each one is verified reachable on this exact board.
3. Split by frequency. High-frequency survivors become the default listed set. Low-frequency survivors become bonus, or they are discarded. Proper names tend to stay on the bonus side even when frequency is ambiguous.
4. Hand-cap. A person reads the list. A rare ENABLE entry is not required just because the path is clean. A cluster of names or a list that would need a specialist dictionary is not a kind Tuesday.

Each shipped file is a dated JSON document under /puzzles/. The app fetches the day you opened and a short lookahead so a later visit can still play offline. Those files are data, not pages; they are disallowed in robots.txt and are not in the sitemap. Pathwords does not publish a dated answer page for each board. The archive is how you replay a day.

A longer walk through that pipeline — with the decisions left in — is the journal note How a Pathwords board is built. Listed words and bonus words covers which side of the split a word lands on. Why Pathwords allows diagonal steps is the geometry note.

What is free

Today’s Mini, Classic, and Mega. The whole archive. Three hints on every board, plus the option to watch a house video for two more if you have run out and a listed word is still missing. Stats and streaks stay on your device. There is no paywall on past days and no account wall on play.

What “free” means in practice:

• Today’s boards — all three sizes, every local calendar day.
• The archive — past official days, streak-neutral, each with its own hint pool.
• Hints — three free per puzzle per mode; house-video extras when a listed word is still missing.
• Progress — found words, ranks, and streaks in this browser. No Pathwords login.
• Modes — Mini, Classic, Mega, and the Kids Settings toggle. No separate kids site and no paywall on Mega.

The web product does not sell a Premium tier for unlimited random boards. If you finish today’s Classic and want another sitting, switch mode for the same day or open a past day from the archive. That is the web shape of “play more.”

The iOS app Pathwords Puzzle is a different property. This page does not sell it and does not repeat store listing copy. On that app, “Play Another Puzzle” can load a locally generated board; free play there may show a rewarded video, and that app’s own policy covers those details. If you came from the App Store looking for that app’s policy, the iOS document is at /app-privacy (unlisted, not in the sitemap).

How play feels day to day

Open the site. Classic loads by default. Trace paths until the listed set is done, or stop at Good and come back later — the in-progress board stays in this browser until you finish it or clear site data. The day turns over at your local midnight, not at a single worldwide hour. One automatic streak freeze per calendar month covers a single miss; a second miss in the same month breaks the streak. Archive nights do not spend or extend that number.

You can drag on a phone, type on a laptop, or mix both. Keyboard play is first-class: arrow keys, space, Enter, Backspace, Escape. Rotation is there when your eyes need a new angle. Letter-count assist is there when you want a quieter mid-game nudge without spending a hint. None of that requires an account, and none of it invents a second ruleset.

If the sitting feels like a warm-up or a focused break, that is fine — and still just puzzle play. Miss a day when life is loud; return via today’s board or the archive without a lecture. The habit is the board, not a guilt counter.

A puzzle for enjoyment — not a medical brain-training program

Pathwords is a daily letter-path word puzzle. People sometimes file word games under “brain games” or next to apps marketed as cognitive training. Those shelves can sit side by side in a store; the promises should not. This product invites engagement with a finite board: paths, listed words, optional bonus, untimed play, a free archive. It does not claim to train cognition in a clinical sense, raise IQ, guarantee job or school performance, or prevent, treat, cure, or delay any condition. We do not invent studies or say “clinically proven.”

In one line: Pathwords is a puzzle for enjoyment, not a medical brain-training program.

Soft language we use on purpose: warm-up in the everyday sense (a short sitting before the day opens), focus as attention on the letter path (read, hold a trail, choose the next tile), habit as showing up when you want to — without streak guilt as a sales tool. Soft language we refuse: disease hooks, outcome guarantees, and costume-clinic vocabulary draped over a word game.

If you arrived from a search that mixed Pathwords with “brain training” catalogs or with ThinkFun’s older Brain Fitness PathWords framing, this page is the correction: pathwords.co is an independent letter-path daily at pathwords.co. Same kind of connect-letters puzzle as other grids in the family; different site and list; not a training suite.

Contact

Pathwords is published at pathwords.co. For privacy or a correction, write to privacy@pathwords.co. The indexable web policy is at /privacy. The how-to, with the five rules in full, is at /how-to-play. Product notes and board-building writeups live in the Journal. Common questions are collected on /faq.

Play today’s board on the homepage.