LinkedIn Pinpoint, Crossclimb and Wend Tips to Win

Pinpoint: reading the words like clues, not a list

Pinpoint reveals up to five words one at a time, and your goal is to name the category that connects all of them before you've seen every word. The first word alone is almost never enough — it could belong to dozens of categories — so treat it as a loose hypothesis rather than an answer. The real skill is updating your guess as each new word narrows the possibilities, the same way you'd narrow down a "twenty questions" answer with each new piece of information.

Pinpoint: how many words to wait for

Guessing early scores better if you're right, but guessing wrong burns through your attempts fast. A good middle ground is waiting for the second or third word before committing, since one word is usually too broad and five words make the category almost too obvious to feel rewarding. Watch for words that seem unrelated on the surface — that's often a sign the category is more specific than your first instinct, like a shared origin, a shared sound, or a narrower subset of a broader idea you considered too early.

Crossclimb: building the word ladder

Crossclimb gives you a set of trivia clues where each answer differs from the next by exactly one letter, forming a ladder from one word to the next. Solve the clues you're confident about first, regardless of their position in the ladder, and use the one-letter-difference rule to fill in gaps. If you know a word four rungs up and a word two rungs up, you can often work out what belongs in between by checking which single-letter changes bridge the two words you already have.

Crossclimb: why the top and bottom rungs unlock last

The top and bottom rungs of the ladder work differently from the ones in the middle — they complete the ladder rather than sitting inside it, so they only lock into place once the connecting words around them are settled. Don't get stuck trying to solve the top or bottom clue in isolation early on; it's usually easier to build up the middle of the ladder first and let the top and bottom answers reveal themselves once the surrounding rungs constrain what single-letter change could possibly finish the sequence.

Wend: tracing paths around the gray squares

Wend hides a handful of words in a grid of letters. Each word is traced through neighboring squares — up, down, left or right, never diagonally — and some squares are grayed out: they hold no letter, so words have to go around them. Words never overlap, and every letter is used exactly once. Start with the letters hemmed in by gray squares or the edge of the grid: a letter with only one neighbor can only be the first or last letter of its word, which often narrows a long word down to one plausible route before you've guessed anything.

Wend: sorting by length

The rows of empty boxes under the grid tell you how many words there are and how long each one is — and both change from day to day, so read them before you look at the letters. Use them as a planning tool rather than solving letter by letter. The longest word needs the most open space to snake through, so look for the longest unbroken stretch of letters first and test whether a real word fits that path. A short word, by contrast, can often hide in a small pocket cut off by gray squares — check tight pockets for a short word before assuming they belong to a longer one. Working from the most constrained word toward the less constrained ones keeps you from committing letters that turn out to belong to a different word entirely.

Pinpoint: a quick worked example

Imagine the first word revealed is "ring." On its own, that could point toward jewelry, boxing, telephones, or a dozen other categories, so it's far too early to commit. The second word, "tower," narrows things somewhat — maybe structures, or landmarks — but still leaves room for several readings. When the third word turns out to be "onion," the category snaps into focus: layers, or more specifically, things known for having rings or layers around a core. That third word is doing the real work, which is exactly why waiting a beat before guessing usually pays off more than betting everything on word one.

Crossclimb: working the middle outward

A practical way to attack Crossclimb is to solve every clue you can independently, jot down the answers without worrying yet about the order, and then look for pairs among them that differ by a single letter. Two answers that are one letter apart almost certainly sit next to each other on the ladder, so use those pairs as anchor points and build outward. Once you've chained together three or four consecutive rungs this way, the remaining gaps are much easier to fill, since you're now solving "what one-letter change connects these two known words" instead of solving a clue cold.

Wend: checking your routes

Three checks are available at any point. First: no letter belongs to more than one word, so if two of your routes cross the same square, at least one is wrong. Second: every step goes up, down, left or right to a neighboring letter — a diagonal step, or a jump across a gray square, makes the route illegal. Third: every letter gets used, so each group of letters still free has to split exactly into the words you have left; if a group can't, an earlier route took a letter that belongs elsewhere.

When something does look wrong, recheck the routes that ran past a gray square first — that's where a wrong turn most often sneaks in.

Keep practicing

Each of these three games rewards a different kind of pattern reading — categories for Pinpoint, letter ladders for Crossclimb, and spatial paths for Wend. Play them on the Pinpoint, Crossclimb, and Wend pages, and check today's LinkedIn games answers for the full daily set, including Queens, Tango, Zip, Mini Sudoku, and Patches.