No. 1

About Babel

Babel is a free daily word puzzle from Source of Truths: a word tile game picked up at the very end. The bag is empty, you hold five tiles and your opponent holds the rest, and the last few plays decide everything. Because nothing is left to draw, their rack is not a mystery. It is the bag minus the board minus your own tiles, which is exactly the arithmetic tournament players do on a tracking sheet. Babel prints the bag and leaves the subtraction to you.

You are scored on spread: your points from here minus your opponent’s. Going out first is the prize, because their leftover tiles come off their score and land on yours. That makes the real question a familiar one to any endgame player: race, or block the lane they need and make them sit on a tile they cannot play. Every position ships with a par computed by the same solver that plays the defence, so par is always reachable and never a guess.

The bag is 65 tiles, weighted toward the common letters, with the Q in and no blanks. It is smaller than a full-size set because the board is 11 by 11, and it is printed on the page rather than left for you to remember. A fresh endgame lands every day at midnight Eastern, and the Sunday Edition deals six tiles a side instead of five. No app, no signup, play free in your browser and race the daily leaderboard. More dailies: Tuck, our tile-tucking word puzzle, Mate, our daily chess finish, and Lode, where rare words pay.