Choo Choo Words

Choo Choo Words is a word game where each word you spell lays more railway track, and a train follows the track behind you. You drag letter tiles onto a crossword-style board, the train speeds up as the run goes on, and the run ends when it reaches the end of the track. There is a new Weekly Challenge board every Monday and a Daily Challenge with a word to spell each day.

Play Choo Choo Words

Free in the browser and on iPhone.

The start of a Weekly run: ABIDE, NONE and NEAT, each played with Lay Track.

How a run works

The train starts in a station on the left of the board. You drag tiles from your rack onto the board to spell a word that joins the end of the track, then press Lay Track. If the word is valid, the rail is laid along it in the direction you played it, and the next word has to join the new end. Recall puts the tiles you have placed back in your rack. A word can also start from any part of the track that is still ahead of the train, and the track after that point is then dropped.

For the first 30 seconds, the grace period, the train moves one square every 20 seconds and the badge in the top corner counts down. After that the train speeds up steadily, and the badge shows how many times faster than its starting speed it is going. When the train is close to the end of the track, the top of the screen turns dark. The run ends when the train passes the last piece of track, and your score is the total of all the words you played.

The board with DEFER along the bottom, ARMOR going up from its R and AGAIN going right from the A. The train is at the A, the top of the screen is dark as a warning, the speed badge reads 4.9X, and grey walls fill the lower right. — Late in a run, with the train at the corner between ARMOR and AGAIN and four squares of track left.

Letters, words and scoring

Your rack holds 10 tiles. Each refill has four vowels and six consonants, never more than two of the same letter, and occasionally a blank tile marked “?”, which can be any letter. Letters score their Scrabble values, from 1 point for common letters up to 10 for Q and Z.

Some squares on the board are premium squares: 2×L and 3×L multiply the letter on them, and 2×W and 3×W multiply the whole word. Placing seven or more tiles in one move scores 50 extra points. Words are checked against the SOWPODS word list, which has 267,751 words, and a word that isn’t in it is shown as “not a word” before you press Lay Track.

The board before the first move: the train in its station, faded hint letters on the first squares of track, premium squares marked 2×L, 3×L, 2×W and 3×W, the target word VERSE in the top left, and a rack of ten letters. — The start of the Daily Challenge for 23 October 2026, with the word VERSE to spell and premium squares around the track.

Weekly Challenge

A new Weekly board is generated every Monday at 00:00 UTC and stays the same for the whole week, so you can replay it and learn its layout. The menu shows a map of the board and counts down to the next one. Each board has grey walls that track can’t go through, and a star. Reaching the star with your track adds 8 squares of track.

Along the route there are pickups that you cover with a word or that the train rolls over:

Freeze tiles stop the train for 5 seconds when a word covers them.
A water tower stops the train for 8 seconds when it rolls over it.
A signal gate adds 4 squares of track if the word through it meets its condition, such as having five or more letters or containing a K.
A letter crate adds its letter to your next rack.
A bridge clears the walls in a 5 × 5 area around it.
An express parcel is worth 60 points at the start of the run and loses a point every 4 seconds, down to 15.

Each week also has a few modifiers that change the rules, for example a 15 or 45 second grace period, no premium squares, 9 or 11 tiles in the rack, or a letter of the week that doubles the score of words that contain it. Some weeks have milestones: in the week of 19 October 2026, reaching 150 points stopped the train for 8 seconds, 350 added a tile to the rack and 600 added a blank to the next rack.

The weekly leaderboard ranks players by their best single run of the week, and you can play as many runs as you like. When a run ends you choose the name that is shown on the leaderboard, next to your country’s flag.

The Choo Choo Words menu: a Weekly Challenge card with a map of the board, the modifiers Freeze Line, Slow Start and No Bonuses and a milestone at 150 points, a Daily Challenge card showing today’s word VERSE, and a Race a friend card linking to Pearcade. — The menu in the week of 19 October 2026: that week’s board and modifiers, and the Daily Challenge for 23 October.

Daily Challenge

The Daily Challenge is a new board each day at 00:00 UTC, and everyone gets the same board, the same tiles and the same train. It has no modifiers. It also has a word of the day, shown on the menu and in the corner of the board, and you keep playing until you spell it. The words come from a list of 194 common words of four to six letters, such as VERSE, CANOE and HARBOR. The daily leaderboard puts the players who spelled the word above those who didn’t, then ranks them by how long it took and then by score.

Stats

Stats shows how many runs you have played, your average score, your best score, your current streak of days played and your longest streak. They are kept in your browser.

iPhone app and two-player version

Choo Choo Words is also a free iPhone and iPad app on the App Store, released in May 2026, with the Daily and Weekly Challenges. A two-player version is on Pearcade, where two trains share one board, both players spell at the same time, and the player whose train collects the most stars wins.

Pearcade 19 browser games for two players, from Air Hockey to Chess, on one keyboard, one phone, phones as controllers or online.

Malay Wordle Wordle in Bahasa Melayu, also called Katapat: guess the day's five-letter Malay word in six tries.

Congkak The Malaysian mancala game in the browser: play the computer at three levels, a friend on one device, or the daily puzzle.