The word collage

Word Fragments

Rebuild words from their written pieces.

Playable · practice preview

No daily editions of Word Fragments are published yet. These are practice rounds: original, machine-validated and clearly labelled, but not yet through human editorial review. Difficulty labels are the author's intention, not calibrated evidence.

Master rounds are written for strong tile-game and cryptic-crossword players: obscure but valid vocabulary, denser puzzles and fewer helping hands. They are the hardest rounds here.

Gentle 14 rounds

Standard 14 rounds

Expert 20 rounds

Master 12 rounds

How to play

Share one tray of spelling fragments between several clued answers. Every fragment is used exactly once, and each answer is its fragments joined in order.

Building the answers

Each board has three to four clued answer lanes, with the number of letters shown, and one shared tray of fragment tiles.
An answer is its fragments joined together in order, with nothing added. Fragments are spelling chunks, not syllables.
Every fragment must be used exactly once across the whole board, so placing a fragment in one answer means it is not available for another.
Two tiles can look the same (for example two KEY tiles). They are separate tiles and either can go where that text belongs.
Select a fragment, then choose Place in an answer. Select a placed fragment to move it earlier or later, into another answer, or back to the tray. No dragging is needed.
A lane cannot take more letters than its answer has.
Undo reverses your last move. Return all to tray asks for confirmation first.

Finishing

Press Submit board when every fragment is placed. A correct board scores 100.
If something is wrong, Submit says so without pointing at which answer; your board stays as it is.
Checking a single answer is optional and counts as assistance in your result.
Any sharing-out that spells every accepted answer wins, not only the one the author had in mind. Boards marked One solution have been checked by a solver.

Hints

Which lane next: suggests an answer to work on and how many fragments it needs.
First fragment: places the right first fragment in that lane and says where it was taken from.
Complete a lane: fills one answer and locks it. Any fragments it needs are moved visibly from other lanes or the tray. Undo history is cleared at that point.
Reveal the board: places every fragment and records the round as revealed, scoring 0.
No hint ever uses up a fragment without telling you.

Difficulty

Gentle: three compound words made of whole words, such as TEA + POT.
Standard: fragments split inside words, with openings and endings that look as if they could swap.
Expert: four lanes with repeated fragments (several identical tiles) and pieces that could start one word or end another.
Master: three or four long answers of nine to fourteen letters, with terse crossword-style clues, cut into two-to-four letter fragments. Chunks overlap on purpose, so a word can often be built from the tray in more than one way, and the same fragment may start one word and end another. A solver has proved that only one sharing-out of the whole tray spells every answer. Answers include less common words a strong player will know.
Each difficulty is a different set of boards. These labels are the author's intention and have not yet been calibrated with players.

Example

With BANK, NOTE, RAIN, BOW, SUN, FLOW and ER: BANK + NOTE = BANKNOTE, RAIN + BOW = RAINBOW, SUN + FLOW + ER = SUNFLOWER. Every tile is used once.

Release status for Word Fragments

Engine rules and tests: passed · Pure engine with tile identity, single use, finite shared inventory, undo, lane locks; exact allocation solver proves solvability and uniqueness claims
Browser walkthrough (keyboard, touch, refresh, hint, completion): passed · tests/e2e/word-fragments.spec.ts
Human editorial review of every round: open
Reviewed practice bank (10+ rounds per advertised difficulty): open
30 scheduled reviewed daily editions: open
Approved dictionary membership layer: open
Observed player pilot and difficulty calibration: open
Manual screen-reader and real-device checks: open