How a Pathwords board is built

What “a board” actually is

A shipped day is three official puzzles. Mini 3×3 with a three-letter minimum. Classic 4×4 with a four-letter minimum. Mega 5×5 with the same four-letter floor as Classic. Classic is the default when you open the site. Each 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 they are not in the sitemap. Crawling them is not how you read this site. Playing them is.

Kids is not a fourth size and not a separate site. It is a Settings toggle that loads a tighter Classic or Mini lexicon aimed at ages five to eight, keeps its own streaks, and omits the Word of the Day. Mega is not given a kids variant. The default audience is general, not child-directed. If you never open Settings, you never see that lexicon.

This is pathwords.co, published by Pathwords. It is not ThinkFun PathWords, not pathwords.co.uk, and not Pathwords App by Richard Arnold. Those products do not share this pipeline, these files, or this list.

1. The generator proposes letters

The first machine step is not “pick a theme” and it is not “drop a pangram in a row.” A generator proposes a grid of letters (nine, sixteen, or twenty-five) that looks like it can support a daily. Vowel placement, the presence of common consonants, and a rough sense that everyday words will be walkable all matter at this stage. The generator does not yet know the listed set. It knows a bag of letters and an eight-way graph.

Why generate, instead of hand-drawing every day? Volume. Mini, Classic, and Mega every local date, plus kids variants on Classic and Mini. A generator will still repeat itself if you let it. The later steps throw bad proposals away. An invented Classic proposal (not a live daily, not a file under /puzzles/) might look like the STAR board used in the other journal notes. Those sixteen letters are not yet a puzzle. Until reachability and the list exist, they are just tiles.

2. Reachability is a proof, not a hope

The engine treats the proposal as an eight-way grid. From each tile it may step to any neighbour that shares a side or a corner, and it may not reuse a tile in the same path. That graph is the same one players walk, whether they drag, tap, or type. Why diagonals count is the geometry note. Here the point is operational. Every candidate string is a simple path on that graph, at or above the mode’s minimum length, whose letters spell an ENABLE token.

ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon, public domain) is the validator. If ENABLE does not carry the token, the board will not accept it. Hyphenated forms and most proper nouns as you would write them in a sentence are out unless the lexicon has that exact token. The engine enumerates the legal paths, intersects them with ENABLE, and now it has the raw pool. Everything this grid can honestly spell.

Listed words are chosen from that pool later. Before they ship, each one is verified reachable on this exact board. That check is why the game should never tell you a required word is invalid. The app’s test suite runs the same check across shipped boards. If a path jumped a tile, reused a tile, or left the grid, it would have failed before the JSON was written. Reachability is a proof that the list and the letters agree.

3. Frequency splits listed from bonus

The raw pool is still too large for a sitting. A 4×4 with diagonals, or a 5×5 especially, can produce more ENABLE tokens than you want on a checklist. 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. The site does not redistribute the frequency data.

High-frequency survivors become the default listed set. Low-frequency survivors become bonus, or they are discarded. Listed words pay two points a letter and they are the only words that move rank. Bonus words pay one point a letter, sit beside the rank, and count toward a fifth star once every listed word is in. One bonus word on the general boards is the Word of the Day. Kids boards do not get that mark. The scoring rules themselves live on how to play. The decision about which side of the split a word lands on is listed versus bonus.

Proper names tend to stay on the bonus side even when frequency is ambiguous. A grid that can spell PARIS has found a name, not a reason to quiz the player. Everyday words (lane, stone, bread, plant) are the register the list is aiming at. Dead tiles, letters that barely participate, are a side effect of an honest graph, not a separate scoring category. The generator is not required to make every tile equally useful. It is required not to hide a listed word behind an impossible path.

4. A person still hand-caps

After the machine pass, boards are read. The hand-cap is a judgment that a rare ENABLE entry should not be required just because it sits on the grid. It is also a judgment that a cluster of names, a nasty Q, or a list that would need a specialist dictionary is not a kind Tuesday. The hand-cap is not a second dictionary and it is not a secret word list. It is the step that keeps the daily finishable without pretending ENABLE is a common-English list.

Kids boards get a tighter pass on top of that. Words a five-to-eight-year-old would recognise, no Word of the Day, own streaks. Mega is built from the same pipeline as Classic, on a 5×5, and is not given that pass. If the hand-cap throws a proposal out, the generator proposes again. A shipped file is one that survived all four steps, not the first grid the machine liked.

Nothing on this page is a spoiler for a live day. Invented examples in the journal reuse a made-up STAR board so the letters stay consistent across notes. Do not treat that sample as a file you can fetch. The real files are named by date and mode under /puzzles/, fetched by the app, and kept out of the sitemap on purpose.

What ships, and what you see

The JSON the app loads is the letters, the listed words, the bonus set, difficulty, and the metadata the UI needs. It is not a page. Pathwords does not publish a dated answer page for each board. The archive is how you replay a day (streak-neutral, own hint pool) as the archive note describes. Three hints per puzzle per mode. Extras on the web come from a house video, not a Google rewarded unit. Progress stays in this browser. No account. Local midnight. One streak freeze per calendar month.

Why write this down

Because “we use ENABLE” is true and incomplete. Four steps, in that order: generate, prove reachability, split by frequency, hand-cap. Skip one and you get a different game. A word-search dump, a trivia quiz, or a board that rejects its own answers. Play the result on the homepage. Product: about. Other notes: journal. Questions: privacy@pathwords.co.

Published by Pathwords · pathwords.co