Weave — Untangle two words from one thread

What is Weave — Untangle two words from one thread

A strand in Weave is two ordinary words shuffled into each other. Neither word ever changes the order of its own letters, so LEAF and MOON can turn into L-M-O-E-A-O-F-N, but never into F-A-E-L. Your job is to run that backwards. Tap a letter once and it flies up to thread A, tap again and it drops to thread B, tap a third time and it returns to the middle row; or drag it straight into the slot you want, where dropping it on an occupied slot swaps the two. When both threads are full the game checks them, and either thread will take either word.

The clock is the real opponent. A free run starts with sixty seconds and every solved strand pays four to nine of them back, up to a ceiling of ninety-six; a wrong check burns three and breaks your chain. The chain is where the scoring lives, because five solves in a row double everything you earn afterwards. Strands grow as you go, from two four-letter words to two seven-letter ones. From the fifth strand a stray letter belonging to neither word joins the row, and from the thirteenth the game stops telling you how long each word is, which is where the real difficulty starts.

How to play

1. Read the strand left to right and decide which hidden word owns the first letter; that one decision usually settles half the tiles below.
2. Tap a letter for thread A, tap again for thread B, once more to bring it back, or drag it into the slot you want.
3. Drop a letter onto an occupied slot and the two trade places; the round arrow button empties both threads when the reading is wrong.
4. Fill both threads and press Check. A correct pair adds seconds and grows the chain; a wrong one costs three seconds and resets it.

Strategies that work

• Work from the ends inwards. The first tile has to open one of the two words and the last has to close one, which tells you far more than the middle. In L-M-O-E-A-O-F-N only LEAF starts with L, so the M beside it is the other word's.
• The speed bonus is 220 points minus 18 per second on the strand, so it is gone after twelve seconds. A three-second solve beats a twelve-second one by roughly 166 points before the multiplier. Place what you are sure of and commit, rather than reading it again.
• The chain multiplier is one plus a fifth per solve and stops at five in a row, so double is the ceiling. A wrong check costs twice: three seconds, and the multiplier back to one. Gamble early, never on the solve that would take you to five.
• From the fifth strand one to three stray letters join the row, drawn from letters already inside the two words, so a letter appearing once too often is usually the intruder. Leave them in the middle row: a stray on a thread fails the check.
• You get two hints a run and each halves that strand's score, so spend them where they buy most. On a strand with the lengths hidden, from the thirteenth on, both threads open seven slots and the first hint reveals the real lengths instead of a letter.

A little history

Weave was written for this site, so there is no folklore behind it. The idea underneath is old and well studied: in combinatorics on words, an interleaving of two sequences that keeps the internal order of each one is called a shuffle, the same thing a riffle does to two halves of a deck of cards. Building a shuffle is trivial; recovering the two originals from it is the interesting direction, and that is the whole game. The loom came afterwards, because two threads with a tangled strand between them is what the operation looks like once you draw it.

Frequently asked questions