Zigzag

Where Zigzag comes from

Grid word hunts are one of the sturdiest branches of the puzzle family tree. Boggle shook letter cubes into a tray in the 1970s and asked players to trace words through neighbors; decades of newspaper word searches worked the same territory in print; and The New York Times' Strands gave the tradition a daily, themed revival in 2024. Zigzag's closest modern cousin, though, is the column game — the format Zach Gage explored with TypeShift in 2017, where words are assembled vertically from stacked banks of letters rather than traced across open space.

Zigzag takes that columnar idea and opens it up. The board is four rows by five columns, and a word is any path that takes exactly one letter from each column, left to right — the path can stay level or zigzag freely between rows, which is where the name comes from. That geometry produces a compact combinatorial space: 4 choices per column, 1,024 possible strings, of which only a few dozen are real words. The day's hunt is two-tiered — ten clued bonus words worth seven points each, and an open field of unclued basics worth three, ten of which count. Perfect day: one hundred, on the nose.

How to get better at Zigzag

Bank the basics first. They are common words you can read off the grid on sight, and every one you find is a lesson in what the columns hold. Thirty of your hundred points come cheap; take them while your eyes learn the board.

Work by variation, not from scratch. Once one word falls, swap a single column and see what survives. A found word is a skeleton: change the first column and a new word often appears; change the vowel column and another. The densest grids reward this one-column-at-a-time prospecting far more than fresh starts.

Read the bonus list as a constraint, not just a list. The clued words are presented alphabetically, so their order pins down relative first letters. If the third clue's answer starts later in the alphabet than the second's, you have narrowed column one before reading a single definition.

Anchor on endings. English five-letter words concentrate hard in their final columns — pairings like -ST, -NT, -RE, -CK. Fix a plausible two-letter ending from columns four and five, then sweep the four options in column one. Twelve mental checks beats a thousand.

Trust the clue when you're stuck. Bonus definitions point at less common words — the kind you know but wouldn't volunteer. If a definition rings faintly familiar, spell toward it: the grid will only permit a handful of candidates.

And remember the clock is a diary, not a deadline. The timer records your pace, pauses when you step away, and never expires. Speed is a brag, not a requirement.

A round in the life

You press Start and read the columns. SHORE assembles itself almost immediately — a level path across the middle. You swap the first column: CHORE. Swap two: SHIRT, then CRUST, and the basics are stacking up at three points apiece. Then a bonus clue catches you: "a longtime companion, often a disreputable one." You stare at column one, try the C, ride the R and O across, and CRONY snaps into place for seven. Six bonus words later you're hunting the last definition with nine basics banked, one short of the perfect hundred — and the grid, as always, is holding out on exactly one more word.