Watch the tutorial — two plays scored on a real board, then where the points come from.

The idea

Build a sentence from the seven letter tiles on your rack. Every word costs the tile of its first letter — a T buys “the”, or “theatre”. Your sentence has to be real English and read as a sentence, with at least one verb and no contractions (possessives are welcome). The game checks.

Your turn

• Play a sentence, swap tiles, or pass
• A play is made on the board: drag a tile from your rack onto a cell, then type the word it begins. Tapping a tile and then a cell does the same thing
• Swapping costs you the turn, and you get one a game — and only while there are tiles left in the bag
• After you play, your rack refills to 7

The board

• The first sentence has to cover one of the four centre cells
• After that, every play has to touch the board: cross a word already there at a right angle, run alongside one so every new line reads as a sentence too, or lengthen a sentence at its start, its end or both — taking in the whole of it
• Words already on the board are free to reuse where they sit: run through as many as your line reaches, as long as the play adds a word of its own

Scoring

Tile points, doubled or tripled on bonus squares, added up, then the sentence bonus, plus 10 for playing all 7.

• 2w / 3w double or triple that word
• 2s / 3s double or triple the whole sentence — at most two count per sentence, so ×9 is the ceiling
• A bonus cell pays once, to the play that lands a new word on it
• Words you cross or lengthen count again as part of the new line
• All 7 tiles in one play: +10

Ending

• The game ends when the bag is empty and someone plays their last tile — or when everyone passes twice around, which is four passes in a row in a two-player game
• The value of your unused tiles comes off your score. Highest total wins

Fair play

• No proper nouns — everything here is lowercase, so names, places, days and months read as misspellings
• Strong language is masked wherever a play is shown, and display names on the list are refused
• Anything that gets through can be reported from the play it appeared in, and that player blocked. See Terms

There’s no dictionary for meaning. We check that sentences are grammatical and mean something, and we do our best — but we’ll sometimes get it wrong. Rejections cost nothing: retry free, and tell us when we blow the call.