A puzzle that respects your lunch break.

7 Little Words is what I’d give to someone who has fifteen minutes in the morning, has tried Wordle, and wants something with more meat on it. It’s a clue puzzle — the only one on our review schedule that isn’t a crossword or a five-letter game — and it does something most puzzles don’t: it splits the work into two layers. The clue tells you what the word means; the tiles tell you what the letters are. You only have to handle one at a time.

The format is unfussy. Seven short clues per puzzle, each paired with a number that tells you how many letters are in the answer. Beneath the clues, a grid of two- and three-letter tiles that you click in order to assemble each answer. Every tile gets used exactly once across all seven answers. There’s no grid, no crossings, no time limit. There’s a daily puzzle and an unlimited puzzle pack, and the unlimited mode is generous.

i Solve in tile-count order

Every clue has a letter count next to it — 4, 5, 6, up to about 10. The instinct is to solve the clues in the order they’re presented. The instinct is wrong. Solve them in tile-count order, shortest first, for two reasons.

First, four- and five-letter words are usually common vocabulary and decode fast; you’ll burn through three or four clues in the first minute. Second, every tile you spend on a short answer is a tile you’ve eliminated from the pool for the long answers. By the time you’re looking at the ten-letter clue, you might have only fifteen tiles left to choose from instead of twenty. That’s a 25% smaller search space for the hardest clue in the puzzle, achieved by simply doing the easy ones first.

ii Count tiles by syllable

The tiles are two and three letters each. When you scan them, count them as syllables, not characters. TER looks like three letters; it functions like a suffix. ING is the same. RE, UN, DE are prefixes. About half the tiles in any puzzle are recognisable affixes, which means you can guess where they’ll go before you’ve read the clue.

A practical example: if I see ING in the tile pool and a clue with eight letters that means “performing,” the tile’s home is obvious before I’ve thought about the word. ACT+ING=ACTING. Six letters; not the answer. Look for the eight-letter -ING word. EXECUTING? RUNNING? OPERATING? One of those will fit the remaining tile pool, and the clue will tell you which.

About half the tiles are recognisable affixes. You can usually place them before you’ve read the clue.

iii The anagram trick

7 Little Words isn’t an anagram puzzle — the tiles come pre-assembled in fragments — but when you’re truly stuck, treat the leftover tiles as if they were one. Concatenate them in order, scan for any recognisable word inside, and work backwards from there.

I keep an open tab with jumblesolver.com for exactly this case. It’s an anagram engine; you feed it letters and it returns word candidates. It’s not really meant for 7 Little Words — I built it for the newspaper Jumble — but it’s saved me on twenty or thirty long-clue puzzles where I couldn’t see the answer. Use it sparingly; the puzzle is more fun when you finish it yourself.

iv Common mistakes

• Reading the clues in order. Don’t. Solve by length, shortest first.
• Ignoring the tile counts. The number next to each clue is the answer’s letter count. It’s the single most useful piece of information; people miss it.
• Committing too early. The app lets you place tiles and remove them. If you’re uncertain, drop the tiles in lightly and check the leftover pool before you commit. Three minutes of caution beats a full reset.
• Stopping at the daily. The unlimited puzzle packs are where the genre really lives. Twenty puzzles in a pack, no time limit, no daily anxiety.

v If you like 7 Little Words, also try…

The closest cousins are the reshuffle puzzles — Shuffalo, the daily anagram, the various letter-rearrangement apps. They share the “here are the letters, find the word” mechanic but trade clues for grids. If you’re stuck on a Shuffalo, shuffaloanswers.com is the daily I read in the same browser tab as my morning coffee.

Crosswords are the natural step up if you want crossings and more grid. The field guide places clue puzzles, anagrams, and crosswords on the same family tree.