How to play
Conspellation is a daily word game. You get seven letters and make as many words from them as you can. The rules are the New York Times Spelling Bee's, except on Sundays, when you get eight letters and about 60% more words to find.
The rules
- Words must be at least four letters long.
- Every word must use the center letter.
- You can only use the letters on the board, but you can use each one as many times as you like.
- Proper nouns, hyphenated words and offensive words don't count.
- Every game has at least one pangram, a word that uses every letter on the board.
Type a word or tap the letters, then press Enter. Delete takes off the last letter. Shuffle mixes up the letters around the center. That sounds useless, but seeing them in a new order often shakes a word loose.
Take the seven-letter board above, with T in the center:
- trio, total and robot all count.
- tab is too short.
- labor has no T.
- orbits uses S, which isn't on the board.
Eight letters on Sundays
The Sunday Conspellation board gets an eighth letter. The rules don't change, but that one letter opens up a lot more words: a Sunday game usually has around 65, where a weekday has around 40.
How words score
- A four-letter word is worth 1 point.
- Longer words get 1 point per letter.
- Pangrams get a bonus on top: 7 points, or 8 on a Sunday.
| Word | Why | Points |
|---|---|---|
| trio | 4 letters | 1 |
| orbit | 5 letters | 5 |
| tribal | 6 letters | 6 |
| orbitalPangram | 7 letters + 7 bonus | 14 |
Levels
Your score moves you up through 9 levels, from Beginner to Genius. Each level is a share of the game's points rather than a fixed score, so Genius always means 70% of the points, however big the game is. Tap your level during a game to see how many points each one takes.
| Level | Share of the points |
|---|---|
| Beginner | 0% |
| Good Start | 2% |
| Moving Up | 5% |
| Good | 8% |
| Solid | 15% |
| Nice | 25% |
| Great | 40% |
| Amazing | 50% |
| Genius | 70% |
| North Star / Queen Bee | Every word |
Genius isn't quite the top, though. Find every word and you reach the North Star, which NYT games call Queen Bee.
When you're stuck
The Hints tab tells you how many words and pangrams you have left, without giving any of them away. Under that, a grid counts the remaining words by first letter and length, and a list shows how many start with each pair of letters. If you've used the NYT's Spelling Bee forum, both will look familiar.
Still nothing? In the Answers tab, Take a nudge shows you one word you haven't found and what it means. It also names a pattern the word fits, like an ending it shares with other words, and says how many other words with that pattern are left. The word doesn't score until you type it in yourself, and there's no limit on nudges.
If you've had enough, Reveal all words at the bottom of the Answers tab shows the whole list. Nothing gets scored for you, and any word you type after that still counts.
A new game every day
A new Conspellation game gets released every day at midnight Pacific time.
Older games are all in the Conspellation Archive, back to the first one on September 1, 2026. The NYT archive has every New York Times Spelling Bee since May 9, 2018.
You don't need an account to play. Your progress is saved in your browser. Sign in to take it to your other devices and see your stats.
Conspellation vs Spelling Bee games
Conspellation plays by Spelling Bee's rules, but its games are made differently. Games are made from a generator I've refined over the course of months by playing hundreds of games myself. I've tried tuning it for as much fun as possible while minimizing obscure word frustration. Feel free to reach out to me any time to let me know how I did or if you have any feedback!