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Hidden Words Puzzle

Remove five adjacent hidden words from one persistent board and watch every column fall under real gravity.

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How to use

  1. 1.Read the current five-letter target, then select its letters in order through cells that share an edge; diagonal jumps and reused cells are rejected.
  2. 2.Use Clear path to revise a route, then press Check word when five cells are selected; a correct path becomes empty and each column falls downward.
  3. 3.Remove all five targets for 1,000 points, while avoiding a second distinct wrong coordinate path because it locks the board until Restart.

About Hidden Words Puzzle

Hidden Words Puzzle is a five-round letter-grid game in which every correct answer permanently changes the same board. It is deliberately different from a static word search. A traditional search usually leaves all letters in place after a word is found. Here, you select the current target through a continuous path of cells that share an edge. When the path is correct, those exact cells become empty and the remaining letters fall downward inside their existing columns. The next target must then be found in the transformed board, not in a replacement grid.

The board begins as a fixed 5 by 5 arrangement. Each target contains five letters, and a path is built one cell at a time. The first cell may be any nonempty cell. Every later cell must be directly above, below, left, or right of the previous selection. Diagonal jumps are not allowed, and the same coordinate cannot be used twice in one path. Selected cells show an order number so the route remains understandable without relying on color alone. The current target, selected letters, selection count, unique miss count, round, and score are all exposed as text.

Gravity is a real state transformation. After a correct check, the chosen coordinates are written as empty cells. Each column is then processed independently: its remaining nonempty letters retain their vertical order and are aligned against the bottom row. Empty spaces collect above them. No new board is loaded, no hidden preset replaces the grid, and no letter moves sideways into another column. This distinction is covered by an independent test oracle that removes cells and compresses columns without calling the product gravity function.

The five fixed removals each award 200 points, producing an exact final score of 1,000. The independent oracle begins from literal board rows and follows literal coordinate paths. After every removal, it compares the complete resulting board with a separately authored expected snapshot. One target begins on the fourth row and is selected on the fifth row after the first clear, directly proving that letters moved downward before the next round. The full suite reaches an entirely empty board only after all five successful checks.

Use touch, mouse, or keyboard to play. Every occupied letter is a native button with at least a 44-pixel interaction height. Keyboard users can Tab through available cells and press Enter or Space to select. Clear path removes the current selection without changing the board or miss history. Check word is enabled only when the path contains the same number of cells as the target. The constrained square grid, minimum-zero columns, breaking feedback text, and overflow guard keep the page from developing horizontal overflow on narrow phones.

The failure policy is deterministic. A wrong complete coordinate path records one unique signature. Checking that exact same ordered path again is deduplicated and does not consume another miss. Clear the selection to try a different route. A second distinct wrong path deadlocks the board: letter buttons, Clear path, and Check word become frozen, and subsequent logic calls are atomic no-ops. Restart is the only recovery path and restores the original board, first target, empty selection, zero score, and empty miss set. Invalid coordinates, out-of-range cells, fractional coordinates, empty cells, repeated cells, nonadjacent jumps, incomplete checks, deadlocked states, and completed states also leave protected state unchanged.

The five target spellings are audited reference data. Princeton WordNet 3.1 is the primary lexicon. Its official HTTPS dictionary archive returned HTTP 200, and every target noun was read from dict/index.noun. Five Cambridge Dictionary pages independently cross-check the spellings and noun entries, and each page also returned HTTP 200. The board layout, order, coordinate paths, gravity model, two-miss rule, and scoring are original product fixtures rather than dictionary claims.

Future solution coordinates are never placed in aria labels, data attributes, correct-answer attributes, hidden text, or a DOM-resident path list. A cell exposes only its current visible letter, row, column, and whether the player selected it. The test fixture may contain audited golden paths, but the interactive component does not import or render them. This keeps accessibility labels useful without turning them into an answer channel.

The game runs entirely as a client-side L1 experience. Selection paths, attempts, gravity updates, and scores are calculated locally and are not uploaded for processing. No account is required. The shared GameShell provides score and local best-score behavior, deterministic Restart, and the Boss Key. Because the same compact board is used from the first move to the last, players can reason about how one removal changes the space available for the next target instead of merely scanning five unrelated puzzles.

Methodology & sources

Target noun spellings are checked against Princeton WordNet 3.1 dict/index.noun and independently against Cambridge Dictionary. Product paths require Manhattan distance exactly 1 between consecutive unique occupied coordinates. Correct coordinates are nulled, then each column's nonempty values retain order and align to the bottom. A test-private literal board and independent removal/column-compaction oracle verify every intermediate board without calling product gravity.

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