The objective of the game is to form as many valid words as possible during the specified amount of time. Form words of three or more letters and submit them by either double-clicking the last letter or clicking the word below the letter area. The letters in the word must be next to each other on the grid (in the example below, FIRE has been spelled). If a word is approved it will show up in the green area, if the word is not valid it will show up in the red area. If a word is valid but already taken by you or another player, it will be grayed out.

At any time chat messages may be written by typing on the keyboard, the chat messages are sent to the other players by pressing the return key.

Every Spellbound game is 3, 5 or 10 minutes (only the private games). The player with the highest score at the end of the game is the winner. If you are a registered member the highest score you have received will be stored after a game is over (only 3 and 5 minutes games). Depending on several factors you will also receive (or lose) ranking points after a game. Beware, if you log out of a game already running you will lose the same amount of ranking points as losing the game. However if you enter a game that is nearly finished and don't wish to lose ranking you have a short time to get out of the room without losing ranking.

Scoring

The score you get for a specific word depends on the length of the word, and how common the letters in the word are. For instance creating a word with letters such as C, J, X and Z will give you higher score than a word of the same length that only contains more common letters such as A, E, S and T.

Each letter is worth:
A=3, B=5, C=4, D=4, E=1, F=5,
G=3, H=5, I=2, J=5, K=5, L=4,
M=4, N=3, O=3, P=4, Q=5, R=3,
S=2, T=3, U=4, V=5, W=5, X=5,
Y=5, Z=5

The score for a word is calculated as follows:
the sum of the values of all letters in the word is multiplied with 100, this is divided by the number of letters in the word and then multiplied with the number of letters in the word minus two (that is 1 for a three-letter word, 2 for a four-letter word and so on). Finally the score is divided by 10.
For example the word "score" would give:
S=2 + C=4 + O=3 + R=3 + E=1 => 13 * 100 =>
1300 / 5 => 260 * 3 => 780 / 10 => 78 points
Whereas the word "scorn" would give:
S=2 + C=4 + O=3 + R=3 + N=3 => 15 * 100 =>
1500 / 5 => 300 * 3 => 900 / 10 => 90 points

Game Settings

There is a tab called settings in the lobby that allows you to turn the in-game music on/off as well as the sound effects. You can also chose to use alternative graphics for the letters in the game if you find them hard to read.