Word Search Explorer

Phone / tablet

Swipe across the letters in any direction, including diagonals and backwards, to mark a word.

Desktop

Click on the first letter and drag to the last; the mouse does what your finger does.

Levels

Hundreds of puzzles that get trickier as you go, grouped as a journey from one destination to the next.

The theme is the puzzle's own hint; guess which words fit it, then scan for their rarest letters rather than reading rows.

1. Hunt the rare letter. Q, X, Z, J and K are easy to spot. Find the unusual letter in the word you need, then look around it.
2. Scan for pairs, not words. Look for a two-letter chunk like TH or OO. It's faster than reading for the whole thing and it catches backwards words.
3. Check backwards and diagonal first. The words you can't find are almost always the ones running right to left or on a diagonal. Scan those directions on purpose.
4. Use the theme before the hint. Ask what else fits the theme. Half the time the missing word is one you haven't thought to look for yet.
5. Save hints for the last word. One hint at the end is worth more than one at the start. The last word is the only one that ever really stalls.

Most people find this game as the Word Search Explorer app, the PlaySimple one with a 5.0 App Store rating from over 800,000 ratings. The YouTube version is the same game with the install step removed: you tap Play and it opens inside youtube.com, on a phone or a laptop. The app has one thing the YouTube version can't offer, which is playing with no connection at all. In exchange you get a bigger screen when you want one, the same themed grids, and nothing taking up space on your phone. If you already have the app, there's no reason to switch; if you don't, start here.

Wordscapes is the other big word game on phones, and it's a different animal: you're given a handful of letters and build words into a crossword. Word Search Explorer is the search, not the build. That makes it more relaxing and less clever; you never have to think of a word, only find one. If Wordscapes stalls you with anagram blocks, this is the version of a word game where progress is guaranteed if you keep looking. If you want vocabulary muscle, Wordscapes does more. If you want the quiet satisfaction of the last word appearing, this one.