Ember Word Forge — Spell words before the embers die

What is Ember Word Forge — Spell words before the embers die

Ember gives you twelve glowing letters in a four-by-three hearth and asks for a word of three letters or more. Tap the embers in order and press Forge. The word is checked against an English dictionary, and a valid one consumes exactly the embers you touched while fresh ones drop into the empty slots. What makes this its own game is the price of the letters you did not touch: every one of them loses a point of heat. The number under each letter is how many turns that ember has left, and it ticks down whether you were watching it or not.

An ember at zero burns out and costs one of your three strikes; the third ends the run. The hearth is an economy that only decays, so a word is never just a score — it is also the list of embers you chose to let cool. Points come from the letter values, multiplied by length, by how many dying embers the word rescued, by your chain of rescues and by your level. Levels arrive every six words and add ten per cent, but the new embers come in colder: seven heat at level one, five from four, three from eight.

How to play

1. Tap embers in order to spell a word of three letters or more; the Forge button shows exactly what that word will pay before you commit to it.
2. Press Forge. The word must be in the English dictionary and cannot repeat one from this run; the embers you used are consumed and replaced by new ones.
3. Every ember you did not use loses one heat. The number under each letter is what is left; at zero the ember burns out and costs you a strike.
4. Words using an ember at one or two heat pay far more and build your chain. Three burnouts end the run; the Daily is one ranked hearth a day.

Strategies that work

• Before pressing Forge, count the embers at one heat and check how many your word actually covers. Every one left behind burns this turn. A seven-letter word of common letters pays a little over 200 points cold, but stranding two dying embers costs you two thirds of your whole run.
• Each ember used at one heat adds 0.6 to the rescue multiplier, each at two heat adds 0.3. STARE pays 72 points with nothing critical inside it and 190 with two dying embers included. The short ugly rescue beats the pretty word far more often than it feels like it should.
• The chain grows only on words that save a critical ember, and any word without one drops it back to zero. The multiplier is one plus a fifth per link and stops at three, so nine rescues in a row is the ceiling. Never break a long chain for one fat word.
• Levelling is a tax dressed as a reward: every six words, whatever their length, it adds ten per cent and cools the deliveries — seven heat at level one, five from four, four from six, three from eight. Lengthen the word rather than hurrying through cheap ones.
• Q, Z, J and X arrive with two extra heat and are worth eight to ten each, so they are the one thing you can safely ignore for a few turns. Build around them. Typing on a keyboard picks the coolest matching ember for you, doing part of the triage by itself.

A little history

Ember was written for this site and has no older ancestor to point at. It belongs to the family of letter-tile games that runs from Scrabble through Boggle to the modern tap-to-spell puzzles, and from that tradition it takes the weighted letter bag and the per-letter values. The new part is the clock, or rather its absence: instead of counting seconds, Ember charges you for what you did not do. Every turn spends a point of heat on every unused ember, which turns a vocabulary game into a triage problem rather than a race.

Frequently asked questions