Longshot is a 5x5 letter board and five bullets. You drag a path across neighbouring tiles to spell a word, then fire it — and firing is the only way to find out whether the word is in the dictionary, because a miss costs you the bullet just the same. Valid words leave heat behind on the tiles they cross, so the real game is building tracks early and routing your long words back over them later.
How to play Longshot
Drag across neighbouring tiles — sideways, vertically or diagonally — to trace a word of three or more letters, using no tile twice inside the same word.
Press Fire to spend a bullet on the trace; you get five for the day, and firing costs one whether the word turns out to be real or not.
Nothing on the board hints at whether your trace is a word — the score preview tells you what it would earn if it lands, never whether it will.
A hit banks its points and moves you one rung up the multiplier ladder, to a ceiling of ×5; a miss scores nothing and drops the ladder straight back to ×1.
Every tile a valid word crosses gains +1 in value for the rest of the board, and the badge on the tile shows what it is now worth.
A word scores the square of the sum of its tiles' values, doubled if the path crosses the purple tile, and then multiplied by the rung you fired at.
The round ends when the fifth bullet is gone, and your score is graded against that board's own bronze, silver, gold, platinum and expert thresholds.
Lay the track, then run the long word over it
Trace RAT on three fresh tiles. Fresh tiles are worth 1 each, so the sum is 3 and the word scores 3² = 9 at ×1 — a small number that does two useful things: it lifts the ladder to ×2 and leaves R, A and T each worth 2. Now trace TRAIL back across those three tiles, picking up a fresh I and L. The sum is 2 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 = 8, so the word is 8² = 64, and at ×2 it pays 128. Fired cold as your opening shot, TRAIL would have been 5² = 25. The rule of thumb is stark: a cold four-letter word scores 4² = 16, and the same four tiles after one use each score 8² = 64 — four times the points for identical letters.
Longshot strategy
Spend the first bullet on a word you would bet money on
An opening miss costs twice: you lose the rung you would have climbed to, and you lose the heat those tiles would have carried for the rest of the board. A certain three-letter word is only nine points, but it puts you on ×2 with three tiles standing at value 2. That is a better opening than a seven-letter word you are not sure of.
Lay heat where a long path can actually reach it
Heat only pays if a later word crosses it, so pick your long word before you pick your short ones. Trace the long path first without firing, see which of its tiles sit next to each other in a short word, and fire that short word. Three hot tiles stranded in a corner your long word can never route through are nine points and nothing else.
Fire small first and save the monster for a high rung
Points are base × rung, so the same word pays five times more on ×5 than on ×1. If you can see one long word and three safe short ones, fire the short ones first and put the long one last. The end-of-round ticket replays your own shots in the ideal order and tells you exactly how many points the sequencing cost you.
Route the purple tile into a big word, not a small one
The purple tile's ×2 is applied to the already-squared sum, so it is worth twice whatever the word was going to be. Doubling a cold three-letter word adds nine points; doubling a five-tile word standing on value-3 tiles adds 225. Leave the purple tile alone early and thread it into your last, hottest path.
Take your gambles at ×1, never at ×5
A word you half-remember is a bet, and the stake is the ladder. Missing at ×1 costs you a bullet; missing at ×5 costs you a bullet and the four rungs you spent three shots climbing. If a board only offers you a doubtful word, fire it as shot one or two, while the ladder has nothing on it to lose.
Frequently asked questions
How many words do I get?
Five. Firing is what spends a bullet, and it spends one whether the word is real or not, so a wild guess costs exactly as much as a certainty.
Are there hints, or any way to check a word before firing?
No, and that is the game. The tracer shows the points a path would earn if it lands and deliberately says nothing about whether it is in the dictionary, because the only hint worth giving here would be validity.
What does the purple tile do?
It doubles the word. The doubling is applied to the squared sum, and the ladder multiplier is applied after that.
Can I reuse a tile or a word?
A tile can't appear twice inside one word, because the path cannot cross itself, but reusing tiles across words is the whole point — that is what heat is. A word, once fired, cannot be fired again, even if it missed.
Why do scores swing so wildly from day to day?
Boards differ by an order of magnitude in what they contain, so the bronze-to-expert thresholds are worked out from each board's own ceiling rather than from a fixed number. Expert on a lean board can be a smaller score than gold on a rich one.
Is there a new board every day?
Yes — one board a day, the same one for everybody, and one attempt at it. It is free, there is no sign-up, and your run is stored in your own browser.