Word Thief

Word Thief is a word game with a twist: the words on the board are not safe. Build a word from the tiles in your hand and it is yours. But your opponent — the thief — can take it off you by adding letters of their own and making it into something longer. And you can do exactly the same to them. HOW IT PLAYS Tap letters to build a word, or drag them to place them exactly. Every letter counts the same and there are no premium squares: your score is the total length of the words you currently own. Which means it can go down as well as up. You get one word per turn, so length is the whole of it: seven letters bank seven points where three letters bank three, and the turn costs the same either way. Then the thief takes a turn. It might build something new. It might come for one of yours. STEALING Every word the thief owns is a target. Add letters to the front of it, the back of it, or both at once, and the whole thing changes hands — its full length moving from their score to yours in a single move. Its letters stay in the order they are in; you build around them. ART becomes ARTS. Or PART. Or, if you are holding the right tiles, PARTIES. That cuts both ways, and the thief is looking at your words the same way. So the other half of the game is picking words that are awkward to build on. Length will not save you — almost anything takes an S — but a word nobody can extend is a word you keep. PLAY IT YOUR WAY Choose the thief's vocabulary before you start — ten settings, from Novice to Unabridged. Low down it knows only the commonest words and plays like a casual opponent. At the top it has the whole list, and it will find things you want to look up. Press and hold any word on the board and the game will look it up for you — the thief's words as well as your own. Let letters go into the middle of words as well as onto the ends, so CAT can become CHAT. It makes a harder game on both sides of the board, because the thief plays by the same rule. Leave J, Q, X and Z out of the bag if you would rather not be stuck holding them. Every game has a seed, and the same seed always deals the same game. Lose a close one and you can replay the identical tiles and try a different line. ALSO IN THE BOX - A stats screen: tiles played, tiles held, new words, words extended, words stolen - Records that outlast a game: your longest word, your biggest theft, your longest run of wins, the hardest vocabulary you have beaten - Light and dark themes - Your game is saved automatically — close the app mid-turn and come back to it NO NONSENSE No ads. No in-app purchases. No sign-in. No accounts. It works completely offline, because it has to: the app does not request internet permission at all. Nothing you do here is collected, uploaded or shared, and you can verify that yourself from the app's permission list, which is empty. Just a word game.