Free · Multiplayer · In the browser
Flip the tiles. Race to spell. Steal everything.
A real-time word game for two to six players. Tiles flip over one at a time and everyone races to spell words from the letters on the table — and any word anyone owns can be snatched by rebuilding it with one more letter.
No sign-up · 2–6 players · desktop or phone
The one rule that matters
Every word is up for grabs
Take all the letters of a word someone already owns, add at least one face-up tile, and rearrange them into something new. The word is yours now — along with every bonus and every demerit it was carrying. Plurals and past tense don't count, so SNAKE → SNAKES won't save you.
The tour
One round, start to finish
From picking a nickname to the final tally. Every screen is the real game in a real room.
Pick a name, pick a colour
Quick Play, or a room of your own
There is no account. Type a nickname, choose a colour and you are in. Quick Play drops you into the fullest public lobby that still has a seat; a private room hands you a five-letter code and an invite link to send to friends. The rules sit right beside the buttons, so a first-timer can read them while they wait.
- Guest play: a random token in the browser is your identity
- Quick Play matches you into the fullest open public lobby
- Private rooms join by code or by invite link
- How-to-play, scoring and house rules on the same screen
Watch
A round, in motion
Tiles flipping, words landing, and a steal changing hands mid-game — the pace is the point.
How it plays
The rules, all of them
Simple enough to learn in one round. The scoring and the house rules are where the arguments start.
The table
- Face-down start Every tile begins face down and they flip one at a time, on a timer or in turns.
- Claim a word Three letters or more, from the face-up tiles, checked against a 173,000-word dictionary.
- Steal or grow Use every letter of any word on the table — yours included — plus at least one face-up tile.
- No cheap steals Plurals and past tense do not count: SNAKE → SNAKES and HIKE → HIKED are refused.
- Newest copy goes If two players hold the same word the most recently formed one is stolen, unless you click to target.
- First come, first served Claims are handled one at a time in arrival order, each checked against the updated table.
Scoring
- Length Letters minus two: a three-letter word is 1 point, and every extra letter adds another.
- Hard letters Q and Z +3, J X K +2, F H V W Y +1 — printed in the corner of the tile.
- Bonus tiles Green +1 and +2 tiles add to the word they end up in.
- Demerit tiles Purple −1 and −2 tiles subtract, and travel with the word when it is stolen.
- Red letters A ×2 tile doubles the whole word, after everything else is added up.
- Random every game Modifiers are dealt fresh each round, so no two boards play the same.
House rules
- Block -ING / -ER RUN → RUNNING and BAKE → BAKER stop counting as steals, the same as plurals.
- Blank tiles Two wildcards that become any letter; real tiles are always used first.
- Lock tiles A word holding one counts down with each steal by another player, then locks for good.
- Ice tile One per game. Whoever takes it off the board cannot claim for the next two flips.
Keeping it fair
- Vote pause A majority of connected players can pause — no flips, no claims, timers frozen.
- Manual mode The flip rotates between players; pick a tile with the mouse or arrow keys and Space.
- Adaptive pace A crowded board slows the auto-flip down so there is time to read it.
- Reconnects resume Refresh or drop out and you come back to the same seat, words and score.
Screenshots
Every screen, full size
Click any shot to open it. Arrow keys move through the set.
Under the hood
How it's built
The hard part of a game like this is two people typing the same steal in the same half-second. Each room is a single Cloudflare Durable Object, and a Durable Object handles one message at a time — so claims are applied strictly in arrival order, and the later one is judged against the table the earlier one left behind. No locks, no reconciliation, no "who was really first" logic.
The rules themselves — building the bag, scoring, the plural and past-tense check, working out which word a claim steals — are pure TypeScript shared by both sides. The server uses them to decide; the client uses the same functions to draw the live preview while you type, so what the preview promises is what the server will do. Players are guests: a random token in the browser is hashed into a stable player id, which is how a refresh puts you back in your seat.
- Cloudflare Durable Objects One per room. Single-threaded by design, which is what makes first come, first served actually true.
- Cloudflare Workers The game server, plus a singleton Matchmaker object that hands out public rooms.
- React 19 + Vite The client, served as a static site from Vercel.
- partyserver / partysocket WebSocket rooms on the server and a reconnecting socket in the browser.
- Shared TypeScript rules Bag, scoring, inflection checks and claim resolution — pure functions, used on both sides.
- Vitest Rules and room state machine tested without a network or a browser.
Play
Get a table together
Hit Quick Play to join whoever is around, or open a private room and send the link to the group chat. It runs in any modern browser and there is nothing to install.
FAQ
Questions
Yes. It runs in the browser at skwabble.larryamiel.dev with no account, no download and no ads.