How to play LinkedIn Wend

LinkedIn Wend is a word puzzle on a grid of letters with a handful of words hidden inside it. Each word is traced through neighboring squares — up, down, left or right, never diagonally — bending as often as it needs to. Some squares are grayed out: they hold no letter, and words go around them. Every letter belongs to exactly one word, so none is left over and no two words overlap.

Under the grid, a row of empty boxes for each word shows how many words there are and how long each one is. That changes from day to day, and knowing it in advance is what makes Wend a planning game rather than a word search: you are looking for the shape of a route as much as for a word.

The rules

1. The board is a grid of letters, and some of its squares are grayed out: they hold no letter.
2. Empty rows under the grid show how many words are hidden and how many letters each one has.
3. A word is traced through neighboring squares, up, down, left or right, and may bend as often as it needs to. Diagonal steps don't count.
4. Words never overlap: a letter belongs to one word only.
5. Every letter is used exactly once, so none is left over at the end.

How a game goes, step by step

1. Read the rows under the grid first. They give the number of words and the length of each, which tells you how much of the grid every word has to cover.
2. Look at the letters hemmed in by gray squares or the edge of the grid. A letter with only one letter next to it can only be the first or last letter of its word, which makes it a good place to start tracing.
3. Test the longest word next. It needs the most room to snake through, so it usually has only a few possible routes.
4. Trace the words you are confident about and set their letters aside, then look at the groups of letters still free. Each group has to split exactly into the words you have left.
5. If a group of free letters can't be split into the lengths you still need, an earlier route took a letter that belongs elsewhere — recheck the routes that ran past a gray square.

Three tips for your first games

• Solve from the most constrained word toward the least, rather than shortest to longest. Committing letters to the wrong word is what costs you time here.
• Treat the lengths as a plan, not a checklist. Knowing how long a word is tells you roughly how much of the grid it has to cross before you have guessed anything.
• A route is only legal if every step goes up, down, left or right to a letter no other word uses. Check the steps halfway along a long word, where a diagonal or a borrowed letter is easiest to miss.

Ready for more? Read the Wend strategy guide