Wordsearch is not really much like the
word search puzzles that
its name suggests, though you do search for words in a grid of letters.
The game begins by shuffling the 96 letter tiles and arranging them
randomly on the 10x10 board, leaving the 4 spaces in the center empty.
Players take turns forming words as follows:
- A player may move each letter in the word he is going to form,
once, along any orthogonal or diagonal direction.
- The player may move the letters in any order.
- The player may choose to leave some letters where they begin.
- The player must form a word reading in some orthogonal or diagonal
direction (as in a word search puzzle) using all the letters he moved and
possibly others.
- The player must move at least one letter. (This rule prevents a player
from claiming a word that happens to appear in the initial layout of the
letters until enough other letters have been moved out of the way to reach
those letters.)
The score for the word is the sum of the letter values
times the
length of the word. Letter
values are low, zero for the commonest letters
up to 4 for the toughest ones to use; good players can sometimes form
6-to-8 letter words in the middle part of the game worth 60 or more points.