About

Mark My Words is an online word strategy game for 1 to 4 players, for web, Android, and iOS. The game takes place on a hexagonal grid, on which players place tiles to form words. Tile values may be boosted by Double Letter (2L), Double Word (2W), Triple Letter (3L), and Triple Word (3W) bonuses. Each player controls the tiles for the words they play, and your score is the sum of your controlled tile values. But beware: other players can take control of your tiles by building on them!

How to Play

Each player has a hand of 7 letter tiles. Players take turns playing words by placing tiles on the board. You may also swap tiles, or pass your turn. Think carefully about not just the score for the current move, but how well you'll be able to defend your tiles from being taken by other players in the future. Each played word is checked against a dictionary. If you want to know the definition, click the word in the recent plays area.

Rules

• A move must build on at least one tile already on the board.
• A move must be in a single line
• There can be no unoccupied tiles between the initial and final tiles in a move - no blank spaces
• All words formed in a move must be found in the dictionary
• Words can be formed North-to-South, SouthWest-to-NorthEast, or NorthWest-to-SouthEast. That is, vertically, or diagonal to the right.
• If a player plays all 7 tiles in their hand in a single move, that is a Bingo, and those tiles will be locked to the player's color.
• The game ends when one of these conditions happens:
  • A player plays all tiles in their hand, and there are no more in the bag to draw
  • All but one player resigns
  • All players pass consecutively, then the first player passes again.

Game Modes

There are two game modes. The rules above describe the Original mode. In Lockdown mode there is an additional rule:

• When a player captures a letter that they already control, it becomes locked to their color

Scoring

Each tile has a value. That value may increase when bonuses are applied. Each player's score is the sum of the tiles' values that they control. This means that your score can go down when other players take control of tiles! Because of the compounding effect of bonuses, it is common for some tiles to become very valuable. Winning the game may come down to control of only a handful of tiles. Think hard about how to defend, and when to take tiles.

Other Game features

In addition to the gameplay itself, the Mark My Words app features the ability to create and join games, chat with other players, switch between active and pending games and other features. You may log in with your Google account, email address and password, Apple login, or even anonymously. You can set your preferred display name and color scheme in your preferences. These will persist between devices.

Ads and in-app purchases

Yes, we run ads to pay for hosting costs and hopefully make a little money. Actually, hopefully enough money that our one developer can do this full time. But, if you want to remove ads, please consider buying a No-Ads pass. At the moment, these can only be purchased in the Android or iOS apps, not the web version. BUT, if your account has No-Ads, it will have No-Ads on every platform. Purchases will be honored cross-platform as much as practically possible.