How scoring works

Bloomword is a calm word-garden with a competitive heart. Here's exactly how your score is made — no mystery, no luck, and money never buys a higher score. Just words, planted well.

Every puzzle is a single day

When you start a puzzle, the sun is high and it's slowly setting. You spell words from the day's letters, and each word you spell grows into your garden and soaks up sunlight — and that sunlight is your score. When the sun goes down, the scoring day is over.

So there are two clocks in your head: what to plant, and when.

What a word is worth

Two things make a word score more:

• Length. Longer words grow bigger and soak up more sun. A six-letter word is worth much more than a three.
• Rarity. Rarer, cleverer words carry a bonus over everyday ones.

Put simply: longer + rarer = more sunlight.

When you plant matters most

Here's the heart of it: the more daylight is left when you plant a word, the more it scores. A great word planted at dawn is worth far more than the same word planted at dusk.

That's the skill: don't sit on your best find. Plant your strongest words early, while the sun is high.

Banking and ranking

Each word you plant is banked the moment it lands — its sunlight is yours to keep. Bank enough words before sunset and your day is ranked on that day's leaderboard. Fall short and the day still counts for your collection and streak — it just doesn't rank.

After sunset, the pressure's off: you can keep playing in free-play to finish the garden and discover more words, purely for the joy of it (no more sun to score).

The fair clock

Today's Daily is the same letters and the same setting sun for everyone, so the board is fair. And the Daily runs on real time — the sun keeps moving even if you set your phone down — so it's one calm sitting, not a pause-and-think race. (Practice puzzles, by contrast, wait patiently for you.)

That's the whole deal: a shared puzzle, a fair clock, and a score you earn with vocabulary and timing — never with your wallet.

Next: read how we pick the Daily and how seed quality works.