Help > Handy tools

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 puzzle letters. If no letters have been played when you press Shuffle, all the letters will be put on the rack in a random order. You can shuffle the letters as many times as you like. There's also a Mix button that randomly rearranges the letters on the display.

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, which you can do if the "Can drag to rack" option is selected at the bottom of the word display: 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 mix the letters on the display use the "8" 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.)

If you're playing on a touch screen you may not feel the need to use a keyboard, but if you do and your device is an iPad, you're in luck. There's a Keyboard button near the top of the display that brings up the virtual keyboard and you can use it to play the puzzle. Use the "9" key to clear the current word. Playing with an on-screen keyboard isn't available on Android devices.

Full screen view

Pressing the Full screen button above the top right corner of the playing area opens a new browser window with Chihuahua spread out to use all the space available on the screen. The puzzle is arranged so as to create the maximum space for the words you play, to minimize the need for scrolling.

7-by-many display options

When playing 7-by-many puzzles you can choose how the word you are building is displayed. You can have your letters all strung together, as compactly as possible. Or by clicking on the Show letters as tiles checkbox near the top right corner of the playing area, you can see the letters on rectangular "tiles", as in the other types of Chihuahua puzzles. In this case you can use the mouse, or a finger on a touch screen, to remove a letter or change the order of the letters.

Other stuff...

Press the Sound button to allow sound effects to play. To see your Player Statistics page, click the button at the top right of the Player Details panel, or follow the link near the bottom of the Chihuahua home page. Player Statistics has its own Help page. And press the Help button to get to these Help pages.