Chihuahua Help

The letters available for making words

Use the nine letters shown to make as many words as you can. Words must have at least four letters. Normal word game restrictions apply (see box).

Letters can be played in any order, but the letter in the middle, shown on a yellow background, must be used in every word. You should be able to find at least one word that uses all the letters.

How to play

Click on a letter to move it into your word. When the word is complete, press the submit button to the left of your word or the "Submit" button at the bottom left of the board. Another way to sumit a word is to double-click when you play the last letter.

To clear all the letters in your word, press the clear button to the right of your word or the "Clear" button near the bottom left hand corner of the board. Also, if your word has been rejected, just click somewhere on the letter frame, but not on a letter. To clear just one letter, drag it away from the word and release the mouse button when the clear symbol appears.

Shuffling the letters

You can rearrange the letters you have played by dragging them to the left or right. You can also get your letters shuffled by pressing the "Shuffle" button under the "X". If no letters have been played when you press Shuffle, all nine letters will be put on the rack in a random order. You can shuffle the letters as many times as you like.

Using a word already played

If you want to play a word very similar to one already played (for instance by adding "ED" to the end), you can get the word back on to the rack very easily. One way is to drag the word from the word list: keeping the mouse button down, move the word up towards the rack, and its letters will soon appear there. If you prefer, you can use the arrow buttons near the bottom left hand corner of the board. The left-pointing arrow takes you back through the words you have played so far, in reverse order and the right-pointing arrow takes you forward through those words.

Using the keyboard

You can also play using the keyboard: type a letter to add that letter to your word, and press Enter when the word is complete. If you make a mistake, the backspace key returns the last letter played and the keyboard left arrow returns all the letters.

To shuffle the letters, use the "0" (zero) key. To bring back words previously played, the comma key "," takes you back through the words and the full stop, or period key "." takes you forward through the words. (You can remember these because the same keys are used for "<" and ">", but you don't need to use the Shift key in Chihuahua.)

Two types of puzzle to choose from

There are two puzzles to choose from each day, with slightly different rules. To switch between the puzzles, use these tabs at the top of the puzzle:

In the Standard puzzle, you can see the words you missed by pressing the "Solution" button once you've given up on finding any more. In the "Challenge" puzzle (which has a different set of letters), you can't see the solution until the next day. When you come back to the site the next day, you can go back to any previous puzzle and press the solution button to see the words you missed. Of course, you can play both daily puzzles every day if you're keen!

There are new Standard and Challenge puzzles every day. You can go back to any of the puzzles from the past week, and also get a random puzzle whenever you like. To choose a puzzle, click on the selector button above the X-shaped letter lay-out:

Scoring

While you're playing today's puzzle, your word count goes onto the scoreboard (to the right of the game area), along with the scores of all the other people who've played the puzzle. Of course, once you've looked at the solution, your score won't increase any further, even if you keep playing. And once a new daily puzzle comes out, the scoreboard for the previous one is frozen.

There's a button at the top of the Scoreboard that you can use to control whether the scores include the extremely rare words recognised by Chihuahua. If you turn this off, only the more common words are counted in everyone's score.

Player registration

Your score can be anonymous, but why not register a player name and password? Then you can come back to the site later in the day and add more words. You can also return to your latest random puzzle, of either type. Registration is simple and free.

To register, click on the link just above the scoreboard and fill out the form displayed. You'll need to provide a valid email address, because an activation code will be sent there for completing the registration process.

When registering, you may wish to tick the "Sign in automatically on this computer" box, so you won't have to type your player name and password every time you come to the Chihuahua site. (This depends on "cookies" - if your computer doesn't allow cookies, you won't be offered this option.) Also, your browser software may offer to remember your sign-in details. Obviously, you might not want to use these features if you are on a shared computer.

You can update your registration details by clicking on the "Details" button. Players who have provided any details about themselves have their names presented as links on the scoreboard. Clicking on one of these player names displays the player's profile.

If you forget your password at some stage, there's a link you can click on (just under the "Sign in" button) to open a form where you can choose a new password. So we can be sure it's really you changing your password, a new activation code will be emailed to you. The new password will not be active until this activation code is used.

Random puzzles

Get a random puzzle for practice, or just for fun, using the drop-down list above the "X".

When you revisit the Chihuahua Web site and select "Random puzzle", you will go back to the last random puzzle you were playing, if you haven't looked at the solution. Once you're finished with that puzzle, you can get a new one by clicking on "New random" in the drop-down list.

Other stuff...

There's a note above your words to let you know how many of the more common words remain to be found. These words are shown in ordinary type, while the rarer words are shown in italics.

The hit rate (on the top of your word list, and on the scoreboard in the Challenge puzzle) shows the percentage of words tried that were accepted.

If you want to get the latest news on how everybody else is doing on the puzzle you're playing, you can update the scoreboard by pressing the refresh button at the top of the score display.

Press the "Sound" button to allow sound effects to play. And press the "Help" button to bring up this window.

Good luck playing Chihuahua!