Free Brain Games for Seniors

This page has said for months that our word search sheets hide their words “forwards, backwards, or diagonally”. They never did: all 125 of them ran across and down only, and the sheet itself said so in the instructions. Somebody reading that description and going looking for a harder grid would not have found one — and one of you did exactly that last week, searched four times for a harder word search, found nothing, and went off to do the scrambles instead. So there are now four Challenging sheets — Ballpark, Woodland, Old Trades and Flying — sitting near the top of the word search list, right after the four Easy ones. Same large print, same twelve words, same answer key on the back; the difference is that the words are hidden in all eight directions, backwards and diagonally included, and the instructions on those sheets say so. Every other sheet is untouched and still runs across and down, which is what makes them restful — the description now says that too. Searching for “hard”, “harder” or “challenging” finds the new four; before today it returned one sheet called Apple Orchard Days, which our search box had matched on the letters in “orchard”.

Our seven spelling games gave you a meaning and asked you to type the word — but a meaning often fits more than one word. “The season of falling leaves” wanted AUTUMN, so a reader who typed FALL was told they were wrong; “Required to be done; essential” wanted NECESSARY and turned away ESSENTIAL. Every prompt now shows the word as a row of blanks, one for each letter, with the first letter filled in and the count printed underneath, so you can see which word is wanted and spend your effort on spelling it — which was always the point. “Need a hint?” still handles the spelling half. Two answers in the Vintage Machines bee had been stored run together, so a reader typing the perfectly correct “adding machine” was told the right spelling was ADDINGMACHINE: both are proper two-word answers now, and a missing space never counts against you. We also corrected a hint that named the wrong silent letters in WEDNESDAY, let the old bedroom wardrobe be spelled chifforobe or chiffarobe as your part of the country prefers, and reworded a history clue that asked for “the ruler of an empire” when EMPRESS answers that just as well. Play Again deals the words in a fresh order, too.

A reader wrote in to say they could see a word in the grid, tap each of its letters, and nothing would happen. They were right, and it was our doing: the puzzle listened for exactly two taps — the first letter and the last — and quietly threw the pair away when the letters between them didn’t spell anything on their own. Now the letters light up as you go, whichever way suits you: tap the first letter and then tap along the word, tap just the first and the last, or hold the mouse button down and drag straight across it. A run that hasn’t reached a word yet stays lit instead of vanishing under you, there’s a “Start over” button for when you want to put one down, and a card at the start now says how it works. The Travel grid was repaired too — SUITCASE and RESORT were on its list but had never actually been hidden in the letters, so that puzzle could not be finished at all.