ZigZag

Two columns. Ten letters. One rule: you have to keep crossing over.

ZigZag is a fast, bite-sized word puzzle. Ten letters sit in two columns — five on the left, five on the right. To spell a word you tap them in order, but every letter you pick has to come from the opposite column of the one before it. Left, right, left, right. Your word draws itself across the board as a zigzag.

It sounds simple. Then you spot STUDIO sitting right there and realise two of its letters are stuck on the same side.

How to play

• Pick letters to build a word — each one must switch columns
• Words must be 3+ letters, and you can't reuse the same tile twice
• Enter to submit, Backspace to undo, or use the on-screen buttons
• Click the tiles or just type on your keyboard — both work

Scoring

Every letter carries a point value (shown on the tile — vowels are cheap, that Q is worth ten). On top of that:

• 5 letters → +5 bonus
• 6 letters → +10 bonus
• 7+ letters → +20 bonus

And if you land your next word within 5 seconds, your combo multiplier climbs — 1.25×, 1.5×, 1.75×, up to a 2× cap. Stringing three quick words together beats agonising over one long one.

Modes

Timed run — pick your pressure:

• Easy — 2:00
• Medium — 1:30
• Hard — 1:00

Daily Puzzle — one board a day, the same board for everyone, 90 seconds on the clock. Come back tomorrow for a fresh one.

Every board is generated and then checked before you see it: no puzzle reaches you unless it holds at least 15 findable words, five of them long. There's always more in there than you'll have time for.

When the timer runs out

• Your final score, plus a New Best badge if you've beaten your own record
• Words found — out of every word the board actually contained
• Your longest and highest-scoring finds
• You Missed — the big words that were sitting there the whole time
• Share copies a tidy summary of your run to the clipboard

Best scores are kept per difficulty, saved locally in your browser.

Notes

Plays in the browser, on desktop or mobile — keyboard on one, touch on the other. There's a quick four-step tutorial the first time you hit Play, and a dictionary of over 260,000 words behind the validator, so obscure finds usually count.