How to Play Letter Boxed: Rules, Sides & Par

The rules of Letter Boxed

Every Letter Boxed puzzle is a square with three letters fixed on each of its four sides — twelve letters total, no repeats among them. You form words by tracing a path from letter to letter, and each letter you touch draws a line to the next one, building a visible zig-zag across the box as you go.

Words have to be at least three letters long and have to be real dictionary entries the game recognizes — proper nouns and most simple plurals are out. You aren't limited to using a letter only once: any letter can appear again later in the same word or in a later word, since the box never runs out of a letter the way a rack of tiles would.

What makes Letter Boxed distinct from an ordinary connect-the-dots word search is a single constraint that governs every letter you trace, and it's worth understanding on its own before anything else.

The sides rule: no two letters in a row from the same side

Two consecutive letters in a word can never come from the same side of the square. If your word's third letter sits on the top edge, the fourth letter has to come from the left, right, or bottom edge — never the top again, no matter how tempting a top-edge letter looks. This is the rule that forces your path to zig-zag across the box rather than hugging one edge, and it's the reason some seemingly obvious words turn out to be impossible to trace.

Chaining words together follows a second rule: every new word has to start on the letter your previous word ended on. So if "PLANT" is your first word, your second word has to begin with T — there's no resetting to a fresh starting letter partway through a solve. Together, the side rule and the chaining rule are what turn twelve letters into an actual logic puzzle rather than a list of words to find.

What "par" means

Once you've used all twelve letters at least once, the box is solved — and the game reports how many words it took against a target it calls par. Par is the puzzle's own built-in benchmark for a reasonable solve on that specific box, and it isn't a fixed number across every puzzle; a box built around a favorable letter layout might carry a lower par than one whose letters are awkward to chain together.

Beating par, matching it, or missing it by a word or two doesn't change whether you've "solved" the puzzle — any chain that covers all twelve letters counts as a completed box. Par exists purely as a target to measure yourself against, the way a golf course's par gives you a number to beat without disqualifying a bogey.

Chasing the two-word solve

Using all twelve letters in exactly two words is Letter Boxed's signature achievement — rare enough that most regular solvers remember the boards where they pulled it off. It isn't possible on every board; some letter layouts simply don't permit a two-word chain no matter how you search, and on those days a good three-word solve is the real target.

When a two-word solve does exist, it usually hinges on one long word that burns through eight or nine of the twelve letters, followed by a second word built almost entirely from whatever's left over. That's why the strategy below leans so heavily on cataloguing the box's letters before committing to a first word — a word that looks strong on its own can still be the wrong opener if it leaves you with a leftover letter combination nothing can finish.

Strategy for solving Letter Boxed faster

1. Map the box before you start typing. Note which letters sit on which side; you'll be checking this constantly once you start tracing, so having it visualized up front saves real time.
2. Look for the rarest letter first. A box's least common letter — often a Q, X, J, or Z — usually has only a couple of words that use it at all, so figuring out where it fits early narrows the whole puzzle down fast.
3. Favor long words that touch many sides. A seven- or eight-letter word that weaves across all four sides burns through more of the box per word than several short ones, which is exactly what a two-word solve needs.
4. Plan your ending letter, not just your starting one. Because your next word has to start where the last one ended, ending a word on a letter that begins lots of common words keeps your options open instead of chaining you into a corner.
5. Track which letters you still need as you go, crossing them off mentally after each word. It's easy to think you're close to finishing when one obscure letter has quietly never appeared in anything you've traced.

More NYT puzzle guides

Letter Boxed is one of several daily word puzzles TodayHint covers. If you want a different kind of letter challenge, see how to play Spelling Bee for the pangram-hunting hexagon, or how to play Wordle for the classic five-letter guessing game. Prefer a grid over a chain? how to play the Mini Crossword covers NYT's five-minute crossword format, and the TodayHint homepage rounds up hints for every game the site tracks.