About the game

The idea

Word Search Battle started from one question: what if a word search were a race between two people instead of a solitary puzzle? So the letters went away. What is left is a pile of complete words and a simple deal — you pick a word for your opponent, and every second they spend looking for it is a second you spend filling your own grid.

That is the entire game. It takes about fifteen seconds to explain and about two minutes to play.

How it is built

The site is a static Astro build served from Cloudflare's edge, so the first paint is nearly instant even on a slow phone connection. The interactive parts are small Preact islands rather than a whole client-side application.

Multiplayer runs on a Cloudflare Durable Object per room, which holds the authoritative game state and talks to both browsers over a WebSocket. Your device never gets to decide whose turn it is or whether a word was really found.

What it will not do

• No account, no email, no password. Type a nickname and play.
• No ads interrupting a round.
• No chat, no friend requests, no inventory, no season pass.
• No profile on a server. Your nickname and character live in your own browser; during an online match the room holds them so the game can be refereed, and deletes them with the room. The privacy policy spells this out.

Ways to play

• Play Online. Join a queue and get paired with the next real person who arrives. No room to make and no code to type — see how online matches work.
• Play with a Friend. Create a private room and send the six-character code or the link.
• Two on this device. Both players share one phone or tablet.
• Play vs Bot. A full match against the computer at easy, normal or hard, running entirely in your browser.

Words, Numbers or Letters; pools of 30, 40 or 50; grids of 4×4, 4×6 or 4×8; one round, best of three or best of five. The rules page covers all of it.

Who makes it

Word Search Battle is made and run by an independent developer. There is no company behind it and no team — which is the honest answer, and the reason replies to email are not instant.

Bug reports, feedback, abuse reports and privacy questions all go to the same place: contact@wordsearchbattleonline.com. The privacy policy explains exactly what the game does with information, and the terms cover the rules for using it.

Accessibility

The game targets WCAG 2.2 AA. Everything is reachable by keyboard with a visible focus ring, every word and grid cell has a spoken label, state is never signalled by colour alone, and the whole interface respects a reduced-motion preference. If something is getting in your way, that is a bug worth fixing.