Nearly every day for the last couple of years I’m looking at the 5x5 grid of letters. Smartle is a 5x5 daily word puzzle game built on one and the new word game that we are building right now is also a 5x5 game. At some point we asked ourselves a question that we somehow never asked before. Why 5x5? Why not 4x4 or 6x6 grid?
And this is strange because if we take a look at the most popular word games - biggest majority of them are not on a 5x5 grid. Even the famous 5-letter word game Wordle has 6 attempts and therefore 6 rows to try to guess a 5-letter word. So its grid is basically 5x6 and not 5x5. A classic newspaper crossword is usually 15x15, a Scrabble board is 15x15 too. Word search grids are big and can be almost any size depending on the specific game but they are very rarely 5x5. Classic Boggle word search game is on the 4x4 grid.
So the 5x5 board is not the golden standard. Maybe the five-letter word is. Wordle, Smartle and half of the word games on desktop or phone are 5 letter word puzzles.
Five-letter words are basically the simplest first guess. Short words are what come to mind first, and in everyday English about one in eight words is five letters long. There are just a lot of 5-letter words in English, most people know the common ones. Anyone can play with them - there is no need to be a word person to find such words on the grid.
Four letters are also easy - actually people use four-letter words even more often than five-letter ones. But we think that might make the puzzle too easy - the player would see them instantly and the puzzle would be over before the player gets the chance to think and enjoy the challenge.
Six letters are hard for most people. Even for us as we build new puzzle game and try different layouts, it takes much longer to find six-letter words and for players who are still new to the world of word puzzles it can become frustrating quite fast.
So the word length was the reason to make a grid with 5 columns. And after we made that decision, we already knew that we wanted to also have 5 rows - just because we liked a square shape better than a rectangular one. But there were also two practical reasons to it.
The first reason is the phone. In our experience, 25 tiles is about the maximum you can put on a phone screen and still tap them comfortably with a thumb. At 5x6 you get 30 tiles and they become small on some mobile screens and people start mis-tapping.
The second one is room to add more things around the game. In Smartle we realized that a lot of people enjoy seeing their progress on the leaderboard, seeing their achievements and also very soon we plan to add two clans to the game that will be competing against each other. In order to add all these fun things to the game comfortably we need to have space around the core gameplay. And that would be harder to do with 6 rows of letters than it is with 5 rows. So this is basically how we naturally arrived at the 5x5 grid in Smartle.
There is one more interesting observation that I would like to share. The 5x5 grid is much more popular in other kinds of puzzles than in word ones. The classic bingo card is 5x5, picross and nonogram games usually start at 5x5, because it is the smallest board where the picture still looks like something.
So 5x5 is a standard puzzle size that people already recognise. Maybe that is also why a lot of players during playtesting say that 5x5 word grid feels familiar the very first time they see it.
And of course, not every puzzle game needs rows and columns. Our other games are built on hexagons, where every tile has six neighbours instead of four. If you are curious how different that feels, try Hex Minesweeper or Hex Sense.
But for words we are staying with 5x5 for now.
And tell us in our Discord - would you play a 6x6 version of Smartle if we made one, or is 25 letters already enough for a daily word puzzle?