Long words, not many words
How to play Path Pursuit with a friend
- Open the gridBoth players get an identical grid of letters.
- Touch the first letterPress and hold on the letter you want to start from.
- Slide through neighboursDrag to any touching letter — horizontally, vertically or diagonally — to extend the word.
- Lift to commitReleasing submits the word. Valid words score and the cells you used claim your colour.
- Outscore themHighest total when the clock stops wins. Length is worth far more than volume.
The scoring ladder, with the actual numbers
Most word games score roughly linearly — a six-letter word is worth about twice a three. Path Pursuit doesn't. The ladder is steep enough to change what you should be doing with your hands.
A three-letter word scores 1 point. Five letters scores 5. Six scores 11. Seven or more scores 20 and up.
Read that as a rate. Twenty three-letter words score 20 points and take twenty separate drags. One seven-letter word scores the same and takes one. If you can find long words at all, hunting them is not a stylistic preference — it's the dominant strategy by a wide margin.
Diagonals are where the long words live
Any touching letter is legal, and that includes the four diagonals. This matters more than it sounds, because a cell in the middle of the grid has eight neighbours rather than four.
Long words almost always need diagonal moves. A straight-line-only path runs off the edge of the grid quickly; a path that turns can wander the whole board.
Practically: when you're stuck, stop reading rows and columns and start looking at a single letter's full ring of eight.
What the colours mean
Cells you've used in a successful word take on your colour and stay that way for the rest of the round. It's a record of where you've been, not a wall — your opponent is solving their own copy of the grid and your claimed cells don't block them.
The practical use is memory. Mid-round, the coloured cells show you which corners of the grid you've already mined and which you've barely touched, which is usually where the unclaimed long words are hiding.
Three things that actually help
- Look for common suffixes first — ING, ERS, EST, TION. Finding the tail of a long word and working backwards is easier than building forwards.
- When you find a long word, look for its neighbours: plurals, tenses, and the same stem with a different ending are often reachable from the same letters.
- Don't grind three-letter words when the clock is healthy. Twenty of them cost you twenty drags and score what one good word does.
Path Pursuit questions
Can letters be reused in the same word?+
Each cell can be used once per word. You can revisit a letter that appears in more than one cell, but the path can't double back through the same square.
Do diagonal moves count?+
Yes. Any of the eight neighbouring cells is a legal next step, diagonals included. Most long words are impossible without them.
Is it better to find many short words or a few long ones?+
Long ones, decisively. A seven-letter word scores about twenty times a three-letter word while costing one drag instead of twenty, so length dominates volume at every stage of the round.