LexTower

The game

Build a crossword tower from today’s letters. Every run of letters must be a real word — and every word is also a beam. A word needs support: cross a letter, rest on tiles below, or lean flush against a standing tower. Nothing floats.

Each letter’s score is also its weight. Build heavy, high, or far off centre and the whole structure starts to tip — the bubble level tells you how close you are: green is safe, amber is strained, red collapses. The best vocabulary in the world will not save a tower with bad foundations.

How it plays

1. Start on a landing pad: tap one and type a word downward — the foundations.
2. Every placement needs support: cross an existing letter, rest on tiles, or lean flush against a tower. A word over open air wants two supports — or one it balances over.
3. Watch the level. Letter numbers are weight; heavy, high and off-centre tips the tower. Strain is visible before collapse, and an impossible placement tells you why.
4. Bridge the sky: across-words tied to towers on both sides — or two words meeting mid-air as a weaker truss — still count, and score the height they dare.

The daily

Today’s letters are the same for everyone, and the game is untimed — the pressure is structural, not chronological. Same material, very different towers: comparing skylines is the social loop.

Worth judging closely

• Two disciplines in one move: every placement is simultaneously a crossword play and an engineering decision — neither skill substitutes for the other.
• Honest physics feedback: the bubble level and the green/amber/red strain states make the invisible force diagram legible without a tutorial.
• Failure is spectacular and fair: collapse is always traceable to a decision, and the next tower starts in seconds.