Dave’s Word Game (Bearwaves, 2025) is a word game from the people that brought us Feud (as covered by our dear and departed Side by Side boys). It’s a daily game that takes five minutes. Play once, and you’re done. Or are you? And is it five minutes… or ten?
Nutshell: Simple word game with a simple point system… which is insidious.
So what’s this? Every day there’s a fresh grid of letters. When you spell out a word, the letters will disappear and you’ll get one point for every letter.
I remember my first word ending with a sort of disappointment that there was no clever letter scoring. You got the six-letter word HOUSES? Nice, have six points. You got the six-letter word ZYGOTE? Nice, have six points. Oh, you sweated over it? Nice, you have six points. You think you deserve more? Nice, you have six points.
However, the tiles do not replenish unless you empty a row, a column or a 3×3 square, at which point you got a roaring bonus. There’s your points, bro.
And you’ll notice soon enough that there are leaderboard scores reaching up to 200 and the only way they will have got there would be through cleaning the board of letters. An empty 4×4 square, for example, is way more lucrative because it contains four overlapping 3×3 squares and you’ll be awarded points for each.
What you realise is if you want to play this thing like a professional, you’re going to have to control when the board restocks its letter aisles. There’s nothing like miscalculating and finishing a row, seeing your hard work at assembling a 4×4 strike vandalised with renewed letters, like so much GRAFFITI. So far I’ve never scored a full board, but I have scored a board minus one. This is the way.
What seems like a harmless word game, meant to be trifled with on the train commute then calmly pocketed away, can career into a furious contest to spin a high score. Five minutes of picking out words you like morphs into fifteen minutes of headshotting critical targets with laser precision because you give the FULLEST of fucks, plotting not just the next move, but the next move beyond while taking a punt that SOOP is a real word. And then aaaaaargh I emptied a fucking line damn you to fucking hell and now I feel like less of a person.
Even better/worse, Dave’s Word Game allows you to reattempt today’s board as many times as you want, which is how I got my 200 score, as I kept thinking of different approaches to tackling the opening. I have a long, meandering list of strategies in my head and one of them is to constantly marry X to E because it’s a lot easier finding an EX- word in my brain index than an -X- word. And watch out for vowel buildup because that is like cholesterol buildup in your arteries: it will kill you make no mistake.
Sure: it’s got foibles. It did me wrong by not recognising TANTALISE once, so I guess it was looking for what Americans do, which is TANTALIZE. [Update 20 Dec: The Bearwaves bears have worked hard to include both British and Significantly non-British spellings so I suspect I just mistyped. But it’s a good sentence, dear, so I’m keeping it in this article.] Second, I lost a high point score once because I was out of mobile signal at the time, a war of tiles and geometry lost on the 5G wind.
Anyway, that’s Dave’s Word Game. It’s EXCITING.
Dave’s Word Game is available free through the App Store and Google Play with a PC edition planned.
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RAIMENT
SEIZURE
INGENUE
I’ve got the bug now.
does it not take POOS?
or OOPS. it’s got to take OOPS
Bonkers that those hecking, flipping boys didn’t allow TANTALISE
(I’ll check that one because it should be in there)
We did our very best to make sure naughty words and slurs aren’t accepted but POO isn’t over that line
Incredible that I didn’t think of any other possible arrangements of SOOP. Probably because I found a longer word at the time but the brief moment of tension of SOOP was remembered for a lifetime
regularly getting two board clears with each grid now, but i want more! im only finding four- (or sometimes only five-) word board clears. if only i can manage two three-word clears and then a four-word clear for those sweet, sweet bonus points…
imma let you finish but Bookworm Adventures was one of the best word-finding games of all TIME
I think I need to read some books, because I’ve only had a full board clear once. vfig is kicking my ass with his scores. The only thing on my side is that it crashes for vfig whereas I am UNFETTERED/
Bookworm Adventures! They don’t make puzzle stories like that any more, do they?
vocabulary is sometimes useful for cleaning up some of the dribs and drabs, like with ADZ, or SCOT, or AA. but most of my words are pretty ordinary: EXQUISITELY and CUNEIFORM were my two “cleaners” today. my strategy at present is to look for a long word as a cleaner—but im not sure if thats actually good… the cleaner only *needs* to be 5 letters, and fixating on long words might be hiding better combinations of moderate length words from me.
oh also the devs have fixed the crashes! (at least in the test build they sent me—not sure if its hit the app store yet or not).
Oh my god. I’ve been playing it wrong all this time. I hadn’t clocked that clearing rows/columns/3×3’s was the mechanism that added letters! This changes everything. In fact, I was getting a bit stroppy with the fresh letters caking up my grid! My first go just now with this new knowledge got me my highest score yet, 148, and without nearly as much stress or deliberation as before. No board clear yet, was a few letters off this time, twice.
That said, seriously, vfig, very well played on some of those scores!
My best word yet has been BENEFICIARY!