We've been quietly building a new game, and I'm excited to finally talk about it. It's called Pairdle Hunt, and it's the third title in the Pairdle family — a daily word-hunt puzzle that's coming soon to the App Store and Google Play, free on iPhone and Android.
If you love the "how many words can I find?" feeling of games like Spelling Bee, but you want something with a fresh mechanical twist, Hunt was built for you. This post walks through exactly how it plays, how the scoring works, and then digs into the part I find most fun as the person who built it: the math of just how many words are hiding in a single board. The short version — a typical grid hides around 300 findable words, and the richest boards top 600. Let me show you why.
What Makes Pairdle Hunt Different: You Build Words From Pairs
Most word-hunt games hand you a pile of single letters. Pairdle Hunt hands you letter pairs.
The board is a 6×6 grid of 36 tiles, and every tile is a two-letter chunk — SH, OW, ED, OL, DI, and so on. To build a word, you tap pairs in order and they snap together left to right. Tap SH, then OW, and you've spelled SHOW. Add ED and you've got SHOWED.
That one design choice — pairs instead of single letters — changes everything about how the game feels. It's the same DNA that makes the original Pairdle a game of logic rather than vocabulary: you're not just recalling words, you're seeing how chunks of language click together.
It also produces a quietly elegant rule that trips up first-timers in a delightful way: every word you build is an even number of letters long. Because each tile is exactly two letters, valid words are 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12 letters — two to six pairs. There are no five-letter or seven-letter words in Hunt. Once that clicks, you start reading the board completely differently.
How to Play, Step by Step
Here's the whole loop, and it takes about 60 seconds to learn:
- Tap 2–6 pairs to spell a word. They assemble in the order you tap.
- Press Submit to bank it. Valid words drop into your Found list and add to your score.
- Keep hunting. There's no timer pressure and no way to lose — you're climbing, not surviving.
Two rules make Hunt feel generous rather than punishing:
- Tiles never disappear. Unlike games where letters get "used up," every pair stays on the board the whole time. You can reuse
OWin a dozen different words. You can even use the same pair twice inside a single word. - Shuffle is free and unlimited. Stuck? Rearrange the grid as many times as you like — it only moves the tiles around, it never changes which words are possible.
Scoring: Long Words Are Jackpots
You earn points for every valid word, and the points scale sharply with length. Short words keep you moving; long words are where the real score lives.
| Word length | Pairs used | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 4 letters | 2 pairs | 1 |
| 6 letters | 3 pairs | 3 |
| 8 letters | 4 pairs | 6 |
| 10 letters | 5 pairs | 15 |
| 12 letters | 6 pairs | 30 |
A single 12-letter word is worth as much as thirty 4-letter ones. That curve is intentional: it rewards the players who slow down and hunt for the big stuff, without making the short words feel pointless.
As your score grows, you climb a ladder of seven tiers — from Scout at the very start, up through Tracker, Hunter, Wordsmith, Ranger, and Sage, to the top rank of Lexicon Lord. The ladder is measured against each board's supply of common words, so "find (nearly) every common word" is a real, reachable goal rather than an impossible grind.
You also get five free clues per board. A clue points you at the shortest word you haven't found yet — showing its first pair and length — so you're never truly stuck. And every board hides a bonus word (finding it gives you an extra clue) plus a secret word easter egg that's pure bragging rights.
The Math: How Many Words Are Actually in There?
This is the question I couldn't stop poking at while building the game. You look at 36 little tiles and think, how much can really be hiding in that? The answer is: a lot more than it looks.
Here's the rule that governs everything. A word is findable on a board if — and only if — every two-letter chunk it's made of appears somewhere on the grid. Position doesn't matter. Reuse is allowed. So to spell an eight-letter word, you just need its four bigrams to all be present among the 36 tiles.
Start with the raw combinatorics. If you're building a 4-letter word, you're choosing 2 tiles in order from 36 — that's 36 × 36 = 1,296 possible pairings. For a 6-letter word it's 36³ = 46,656 possible chains, and for a 12-letter word it's 36⁶ ≈ 2.2 billion possible combinations. Obviously only a tiny fraction of those spell real words — but that enormous space is exactly why a small grid can be so deep.
To turn that space into a real game, every board is checked against a full Scrabble dictionary. We enumerate every valid English word (of length 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12) whose bigrams all fit the board, and store it. Then we did that one thousand times and hand-filtered the boards, so no puzzle ships thin.
Here's what those 1,000 boards actually contain, measured:
| Per board | Typical (median) | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Total findable words | ~310 | 142 – 624 |
| "Common" everyday words | ~110 | 53 – 201 |
| Rarer / expert words | ~200 | 72 – 456 |
So the board in the screenshot above isn't unusual: a grid you can hold on one phone screen typically hides around 300 valid words, roughly a third of them everyday vocabulary and the rest for word nerds and Scrabble players to dig out. That's why there's no "you found them all, game over" wall for most players — the top Lexicon Lord tier is meant to be aspirational, and clearing an entire board is a genuine feat.
Two design details fall out of this math. First, we enforce that all 36 pairs on a board are distinct — no duplicate tiles — because findability depends only on the set of bigrams present, so a repeated tile would be a wasted slot. Making all 36 unique maximizes how many words a board can hold (it raised the average count by around 40% when we switched to it). Second, we deliberately don't show a "found / total" counter. When a board hides 300 words, a "12 / 300" readout just makes you feel behind. Hunt shows your tier and your points climbing instead — abundance you get to enjoy, not a checklist to grind.
A Few Tips Before You Start
- Hunt for verb endings and plurals. If
ED,ES,IN, orNGis on the board, it turns short words into longer, higher-scoring ones (SHOW→SHOWED). - Chase the big words for score, the short ones for tempo. Bank easy 4-letter words to climb early tiers, then slow down and hunt 8- and 10-letter jackpots.
- Shuffle to see fresh combinations. It doesn't change what's possible, but a new arrangement can jog a word loose. It's free — use it constantly.
- Read in pairs, not letters. This is the whole mental shift. Stop scanning for single letters and start seeing which chunks you have to work with.
Coming Soon
Pairdle Hunt is in the final stretch before launch and will be coming soon to the App Store and Google Play. It's from the team behind Pairdle — same obsession with logic over luck, same clean daily-puzzle feel, brand-new mechanic.
If you want a taste of the Pairdle-family thinking while you wait, you can play Pairdle right now in your browser or on your phone — and if you're new to reading letters in pairs, our guide on how to get better at Pairdle covers the same mindset. Keep an eye on this blog — I'll post here the day Hunt goes live.
Happy hunting.
— Tim