Announcing the Tylogram Summer Challenge!

Win bragging rights, eternal glory, and semi-valuable prizes if you can puzzle out our mystery word in the next thirty days.

One of our redoubtable mascots tries to puzzle out the Tylogram Summer Challenge. (Illustration generated with Bing Image Creator.)

I’m a writer first and foremost, but that has never paid most or even many of the bills. I also work as a software developer, sometimes for other folks, sometimes for myself. One of my major ongoing projects is Spelling Bee Solver, a popular¹ website that offers daily hints to players of the New York Times Spelling Bee. Another is my own original word game, Tylogram.

A sample gameboard from the desktop version of Tylogram, showing a possible arrangement of the letter tiles with their resulting scores.

Tylogram, which launched on April 2, 2021, is a variation on Spelling Bee and similar word finders. Each puzzle features eight letters arranged at random in a 3x3 sliding-tile grid. The challenge is twofold. First, form as many words as possible from the grid, each of which must include the shaded “anchor” letter. Second, rearrange the tiles in the grid to achieve the highest possible scores for the words in your list, with the goal of meeting or beating the house score.

The same sample Tylogram gameboard, showing how the scores for the words in the player’s list can change as the tiles are rearranged. This arrangement has improved the current score from 372 to 611.

Tylogram is free, with new puzzles appearing each Tuesday and Friday. Over the course of 228 puzzles, Tylogram has accrued a small but fanatical base of players. They appreciate that the list of accepted words is much broader than Spelling Bee’s, and many of them even enjoy the mild scolding they get for trying to enter coarse language. (Others don’t, but that’s a story for another day.) Plus, the mascot is a bunny!

Zipper, the official Tylogram mascot, works hard to maintain his rank of Master Wordsmith. (Illustration by William Shunn.)

This is not the place for a full rundown of Tylogram’s rules and arcana, but suffice it to say this game is a bit more challenging than your average word finder. And for the next month or so, we’ve added an additional meta-puzzle on top of our regularly scheduled offerings—the Tylogram Summer Challenge.

Beginning with the current puzzle (July 21st) and for the next thirty days or so after that, each new gameboard will contain one small clue to a concealed mystery word. By the end of the challenge, you will have all the clues you need to identify that word. We will not reveal the nature of these clues, but as they accumulate we hope you’ll begin to see a pattern emerging.

Though the puzzles themselves will offer all the clues necessary to solve the challenge, we’ll also provide extra hints along the way. Each extra hint will in some way relate to the mystery word. The challenge can be solved without the extra hints, but they may help you get there a little more quickly.

Your first extra hint is: Leo

You don’t need to be a veteran Tylogram player to compete! The challenge should be equally accessible to players at all levels. When you think you know the mystery word, please email your solution to challenge@tylogr.am with the subject line “Tylogram Summer Challenge!” Please also explain how you reached your answer.

The first player to identify the mystery word and correctly explain how they worked it out will win not just bragging rights and eternal glory but also one year’s worth of ad-free access to Spelling Bee Solver!²

In addition, at some vague future date when our premium Tylogram subscription option³ launches, the winner will receive a year’s free access to that too! (Hey, we’re very busy, and these things take time.)

Thanks for checking out Tylogram, and good luck! ∅

Our formidable Grand Lexicographer hard at work creating future Tylogram puzzles. (Illustration generated with Bing Image Creator.)

1. A few of Spelling Bee Solver’s distinguished Twitter fans include J. Smith-Cameron, Rachel Dratch, Steven Page, and Dana Stevens.

2. This reward requires a Patreon account for authentication, but does not require any payment.

3. Our planned premium version will allow access to all past Tylogram puzzles. But don’t worry—the newest puzzle will always remain available for free.