Puzzle codes!

Puzzle codes make Wordfive social and shareable. When you load the game or click "Random Puzzle", you'll be given a random puzzle with an associated puzzle code. You'll see this puzzle code printed at the top of the screen. If you get a particular fun, funny, challenging, or interesting puzzle, note down the code and share it with your friends! When they play Wordfive, they can click/tap in the puzzle code box, enter in your puzzle code, then click "Start/Clear" to generate your same puzzle! Hooray!

As a bonus, the new "Start/Clear" button also lets you clear the current puzzle and start over if you're stuck and just want a clean slate.

I hope you enjoy this new feature! Share your favorite puzzle codes in the comments!

For more about the history of puzzle codes and what's going on in the background, keep reading:

Since I started making Wordfive, I knew it needed some kind of shareable aspect--a reason to tell your friends about Wordfive and keep talking about it. At first, it didn't seem like there was any way to share a puzzle that really made sense, and I wondered if I just needed to give up on that idea.

As I started playing Wordfive myself, though, I kept finding puzzles that I wanted other people to play.  There were puzzles with groups of words that painted a particularly clear mental picture or seemed to all be around a certain theme. There were particularly easy or difficult puzzles. There were puzzles where when I first saw them, I thought for sure the game was broken and there was no way there were 5 words in the grid. I wanted to let other people experience these same puzzles, but there was no way to "pass" a puzzle to a friend to try.

That's where the idea of puzzles codes was born. In the background, puzzle codes set a specific seed number for the random number generator of the game. This means that the same puzzle code will always generate the same results. I wasn't sure at first if it would work, but with plenty of testing and tweaking, it turned out just as I hoped! I hope you find this feature as fun as I do!

Thanks again for playing Wordfive!