LinkedIn Pinpoint, Crossclimb and Wend Tips to Win
Published September 14, 2026
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 walls
Wend hides four words inside a 5×5 grid, each traced through a chain of neighboring squares, with gray walls blocking certain connections along the way. The words are 3, 4, 5, and 6 letters long, and every letter in the grid gets used exactly once across all four words, so there's no leftover space once you're done. Start by looking at the walls themselves — they tell you which neighboring squares can't be connected, which often narrows a long word down to one plausible route through the grid even before you've guessed any letters.
Wend: sorting by length
Since you know the four word lengths in advance, use that as a planning tool rather than solving letter by letter. The 6-letter word needs the most open, unobstructed space to snake through, so look for the longest unbroken stretch of connected squares first and test whether a real word fits that path. The 3-letter word, by contrast, can often hide in a small corner pocket boxed in by walls — check tight pockets for the 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 work against the letter count
Because Wend guarantees every letter in the 5×5 grid is used exactly once across the four words, you have a built-in check as you go: add up the lengths of the words you've found so far — 3, 4, 5, or 6 — and compare that to how many grid squares are still unused. If the leftover square count doesn't match the length of the one word you haven't found yet, you've likely mis-traced an earlier word through a square that actually belongs to a different one. Recheck any path that crossed close to a gray wall first, since that's the most common place for a wrong turn to sneak 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.