Amble
Trace the hidden words through a small grid of letters, using every letter exactly once.
- Four levels: Easy to Extra Hard
How Amble Works
Every letter on the board belongs to exactly one hidden word. A word moves from a letter to one that shares an edge — up, down, left or right, never diagonally — and can turn at any step. Drag across the letters and lift, or tap them one by one and tap the last one again. A hidden word locks in place in its own colour.
The only clue is the row of slots under the board, which says how many words there are and how long each is. On Easy that is 3 words of 5 to 8 letters on a 4×5 grid. Amble is played in practice. It is not part of the daily set.
A real word that is not one of the board's words fades, and the game tells you why, such as that it leaves letters no word can use. A refused trace costs nothing the first time; tracing the same letters again costs a heart.
Every board is checked to have exactly one set of words that fills it, against the same dictionary of about 110,000 words the game accepts traces from, and each hidden word can be traced along only one route.
The Rules
- 1
Use Every Letter
Every letter on the board belongs to exactly one hidden word. When all the words are found, nothing is left over.
- 2
Words Bend
Trace from a letter to one that shares an edge — up, down, left or right, never diagonally — turning wherever the word goes. Blocked cells carry no letter.
- 3
Only the Lengths Are Clues
The slots under the board — beside it on a tablet turned sideways — say how many words there are and how long each is. Nothing else is given.
- 4
Trace to Lock
Drag across the letters and lift, or tap them one by one and tap the last letter again. A hidden word locks in place; anything else fades and tells you why.
- 5
A Repeat Costs a Heart
A trace that is refused costs nothing the first time. Tracing the same refused letters again costs a heart. A real word traced along a different route counts as a new try.
The real screens.
Every picture on this page is the app itself, on a board from the game.
Where Amble Comes From
Tracing words through neighbouring letters is an old idea: the letter-cube games of the 1970s gave you a grid of letters and scored you on how many words you could find. Amble belongs to a younger kind of puzzle, where the letters split into a fixed set of hidden words with each letter used exactly once, so the puzzle has one answer, and a word you find also has to leave the other letters able to spell the rest.
Dayzle built Amble in September 2026, together with its hexagonal twin, Amble Hive. In Dayzle's version a word moves only up, down, left or right, which keeps the routes through each letter few; the lengths are the only clue; and every board is proved to have exactly one answer against the full dictionary, so a real word that strands the rest is wrong for anyone, however many obscure words they know.
How the Levels Differ
The bands grow by board size and word count, and every band draws its words from the familiar end of the word list. Easy is a 4×5 grid with 3 words of 5 to 8 letters. Medium is 5×6 with 4 words of 5 to 8 letters. Hard is 6×8 with 6 words of 5 to 9 letters. Extra Hard is 7×9 with 8 words of 5 to 9 letters. Blocked cells, which shape the routes, go from 0 to 2 on Easy up to 4 to 7 on Extra Hard.
A bigger board also holds more real words that are not answers: a typical Easy board has about 6 of them and a typical Extra Hard board about 40. Each word you lock leaves fewer letters for the rest, so a board gets quicker as it fills in.
How a board gets harder.
Amble has one deduction — a real word that leaves letters no word can use is not an answer — and the rest is spotting words, so its hints show where a word is instead of naming a technique. The first hint lights the first letter of the easiest word to start: the letter that the fewest real words of that length can be traced from. The second names the word and draws its whole route. A harder board is a bigger search: 20 cells and 3 words on Easy, 63 cells and 8 words on Extra Hard.
More word games.
Words
Amble Hive
Amble on a honeycomb
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Word Search
Find the listed words hidden in a grid
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Forage
Build words from a bag of letters
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Cipher
Deduce the hidden word
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Tumbler
Turn one word into another, a letter at a time
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Beacon
Watch the words light up, tap them back in order
Today's five are waiting.
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