Wobble Mysteries

An asymmetric word game for one wordy mastermind and one to four clever detectives, by Jonathan Leistiko. The mastermind builds a crossword face down; the detectives read it one guess at a time. This is the digital table: the shared screen holds the board, and everyone plays from a phone.

The story

Something strange is afoot in the town of Calder Wobblers. A devious mastermind has pulled off a cunning caper. They have a head start on you, but they have left a trail of clues. Can you decipher the clues and foil their fiendish plan before they escape?

Setting up a table

1. Open the table on a TV or laptop everyone can see. It shows a four-letter room code and a QR code. (A table without a shared screen works too: every phone can show the board.)
2. Join from your phone by scanning the QR, or by typing the address and the code. Pick a name.
3. Take a seat. Everyone sits down a detective 🔎 and the house, a computer mastermind, takes the mastermind's chair 🎩. A player who wants to build the crossword taps Mastermind in the lobby; the phone warns that it is the harder seat first. Leave the chair and it goes back to the house. Mid-game, a mastermind who has to leave taps ⋯ then Step away and the house plays their racks from there — they keep watching and can tap Take my chair back. If the mastermind's phone drops, any detective can hand the chair to the house.
4. Choose the options (below) — the defaults are the house rules this page describes — and press start. A phone that drops out can rejoin with the same name and lands back in its seat.

The board and the tiles

The board is the printed 11×11 grid of Calder Wobblers, with twelve named districts — the Warehouse District, Calder Marsh, the West Slums, Precinct 33, Three Hills, the Morgue, the City News, Riverside, the Grand Library, the East Graveyard, Greenlawn and the South Docks. The purple square in the middle is where the first word must go. Bigger boards (13×13, 15×15) are the same map scaled up, every district in its place. Without character powers the districts are scenery.

One hundred tiles

They are not Scrabble's. Every vowel is worth nothing, and so are the common consonants, so points come from the awkward letters.

Blanks stand for any letter and are worth nothing. The detectives are told how many blanks a word used, but not where they are.

Evidence. Forty-eight tiles carry a piece of evidence — a bomb 💣, blackmail ✉, poison ☠ or dirty money 💰. They score nothing on their own; the character powers are what make them matter.

How a round goes

1. The mastermind's turn. In the opening round the mastermind lays one word for every guess the team holds — with the default settings, one per detective, and two if a detective is playing alone, but never more than three. After that it is one word a round. Each goes down face down and scores at once.
2. The detectives' turn. The team spends its guesses, one at a time, on any clue sheets it likes.
3. The check. The detectives win the instant their score reaches the mastermind's — even mid-turn. Otherwise, if the mastermind is on the target at the end of the round, they escape. If not, the next round begins.

The mastermind's turn

Racks

The mastermind holds two racks of seven tiles and uses one per round, alternating, with no moving tiles between them. The phone shows both at full size — NOW, the one to play from, and NEXT, the one for next turn — so you can plan a word around what the next rack will hook onto. As tiles go down, the card over the racks scores the word. After every word the rack draws back up to seven.

Laying ahead. While the detectives are guessing, you can put next round's word down from the NEXT rack and tap Lay ahead. Nobody else sees it. The moment their turn ends it goes down face down, as your play for the round, so the table never waits on you. Move a tile to change it, or Clear to take it back and play on your own turn instead (which you need to do to spend a power before playing). If something has changed by then and the word no longer goes, your phone says why and you play as usual. The Spider Queen picks her rack on her own turn, so she does not lay ahead.

Laying a word

• Words read left to right or top to bottom, in one line.
• The first word of the game must cover the middle square. Every word after that must use at least one tile already on the board, crossword-style.
• Every run of two or more letters the play makes must be a real word. If a play forms more than one new word, each one scores and gets its own clue sheet.
• The dictionary is enforced: the server will not accept a made-up word. A human mastermind may lay any real word; the house mastermind is held to everyday words by default (see options).
• A blank can be any letter. Say which when you place it.

What the detectives are told

Tiles go down face down. Every new word gets a marker on its first letter showing its points and pointing the way it runs — red while it is hidden, teal once it is cracked. (The printed game puts the round number there; on the screen the points are the thing worth reading.) Each new word gets a clue sheet showing its length, what its letters are worth, and how many blanks it used — nothing else.

Scoring

A word scores the sum of its letters. Every word scores at least 1, even one made of nothing but vowels — but the clue sheet still shows the true letter sum (often 0), so the detectives can use it as a clue. The mastermind never loses points.

More than one word a round

With two or more words owed, the mastermind lays them one after another, drawing back up in between. Each is its own play, scores on its own, and gets its own marker. The phone counts them down (“build a word, 1 more after this”).

• Passing. A rack that cannot reach the board can pass. A pass gives up all the words still owed this round, and the detectives go.
• On the target. Once the mastermind's score reaches the target, the rest of the round's words are not laid — the getaway car is running, and every extra word would only be one more clue.

The detectives' turn

1. Talk it over. Any detective can open any clue sheet and start typing. Each detective's line shows on every screen in their own colour, so the team can see who is working what.
2. Send a guess. A guess has to be the right length and, by default, a real word. Anyone on the team can send it; it spends one of the team's guesses.
3. Read the marks (next section). If every letter is a box, the word is cracked.
4. Keep going until the guesses are spent. The round ends then — or earlier, if the team passes, which gives up whatever guesses were left.

When a word is cracked its tiles turn face up for everyone, the team scores double its sheet, and every word crossing it gains a known letter.

How a guess is answered

A box means the right letter in the right place. A line means the right letter in the wrong place. Anything else is a miss. Repeated letters are answered most-correct-first, and a letter is only marked as many times as it appears in the answer: against TRAVEL, a guess of STREET comes back like this.

The E in the fifth place is exactly right, so it takes the box; TRAVEL has only one E, so the other E is a miss. TRAVEL has one T, and the first T in the guess claims it as a line, so the second T is a miss.

Scoring and winning

• The detectives win the moment their score reaches the mastermind's. A tie is a conviction.
• The mastermind wins by being on the target (50 by default) at the end of a round without being caught. When they reach it, the table is warned: the detectives have the rest of that round to draw level.
• A dead game — bag empty, and two passes in a row — ends on the scores as they stand; the mastermind is ahead, or they would already have been caught.

Because the mastermind never loses points, the detectives only gain on the words they crack. The doubling is the margin, which is why every cracked word matters — and why a word the mastermind can make unreadable is worth more than one that scores big.

Words and guesses a round

The team gets the same number of guesses every round, and the mastermind opens with that many words, so a bigger team has more to read from the first turn. After the opening, the mastermind lays one word a round. Whatever the setting, the team never gets more than three guesses before the mastermind lays the next word (a house rule since 2026-10-10), so the opening is never more than three words either. The table chooses the number in the lobby:

Only detectives who are connected count, and the number is fixed at the start of each round, so a phone that drops out mid-round does not change it.

What the table does for you

A paper table would do all of this by rereading every clue sheet. None of it tells you anything the marks did not already.

• Pencil marks. A box settles a square, so the letter is pencilled onto the board — the tile stays face down, but the letter shows in green with a dotted underline. Squares are shared, so a box on an across word pencils a letter into every down word crossing it, and each clue sheet starts filled in with whatever the team has proved.
• Ruled-out letters. A line or a miss says a square is not that letter; a letter that drew nothing anywhere in a guess is in none of that word's squares. The keyboard greys out letters a guess ruled out of the word. Face-down squares carry a red ring when something has been ruled out.
• Letters used up. The phone's keys cross off letters whose every copy is already face up or proved.
• Letters too dear. Points never go negative, so a word's letters still to find can be worth no more than its score less the letters already settled. The keyboard greys out anything dearer: a 2-point word has no Q.
• Auto-cracking. A sheet whose every letter is already proved cracks itself at the end of the turn — no guess spent, points paid — and it cascades: its tiles can finish the words crossing it, which crack too.
• Autoscore. As you type, the phone adds up your letters against the sheet's score and flags a line that cannot add up. Handy, and switchable per phone (sums, under the keyboard).
• Tidy sheets. Cracked sheets are hidden on phones by default (per phone) and always on the shared screen, where the board already shows them face up; a sheet opens pre-filled with the team's last guess on it. The shared screen also keeps a guess log: the latest guesses, newest first, with who made each one and how it was marked.

Table options

Character powers

An optional layer from the printed game. Switch it on and every seat is dealt a character at random; before the start you may swap for any card nobody holds. No duplicates.

Fair warning: powers are not balanced yet. In the simulator the house mastermind with powers wins nearly every game, and a higher target does not fix it — the card bonuses outrun the team. Play them for the fun of the cards, and expect the mastermind to have the upper hand.

Charges

• The detectives share one pool. A guess that sets off any detective's trigger adds one charge to the pool, however many cards fired. Any detective may spend from it on the powers of their own card, and on the pool's own powers below.
• Nothing landed. Whatever the cards, a guess where no letter lands at all — no boxes, no lines — earns the team a charge. It counts toward the same one charge a guess, so it never stacks with a card's trigger.
• A charge a detective spends goes to the mastermind. That is the mastermind's only income, unless their card says otherwise.
• Powers that cost charges show the price on the card. A mastermind uses powers on their own turn; detectives whenever the game is running.
• The house plays Doctor Dee, the Wordsmith, the Mad Bomber or Senator Golden, and spends its charges.

The team pool's powers

Any detective can buy these from the pool, whatever card they hold, on the clue sheet they have open. Like every detective spend, the charges go to the mastermind. Each works once per sheet, and if there is nothing on file for the word, nothing is spent.

The answers appear on the clue sheet for the whole team, on every phone and on the table screen.

The masterminds

The detectives

Card text follows the printed cards, with a few house rulings where the cards leave room or the simulator found a broken combination: Calm fires on any guess with no boxes; Expert in Deduction looks at the racks, not the bag; Thoroughly Corrupt is capped at 3 a turn; Spiritual Guidance may not name a letter that is all face up; bonus points are banked, so cracking a word does not take them back. With the multi-word round, “at the start of your turn” powers fire once per round and “at the end of your turn” draws happen after every word.

Playing alone: the Daily Case, the Dabble and the Murder

Three puzzles a day, the same for everyone who plays them that day (the day turns over at midnight, Central time). Each is one detective against the house, each keeps a leaderboard, and only a name's first go at a day counts — another go is practice. The join screen lists the others under Or play on your own today, and the phone's ? sheet has all four — 🎲 Wobble · 🧩 Dabble · 🕵️ Murder · 🗂 Daily Case — under Ways to play, ticking off the ones you have done today and taking you back to your table game; an unfinished daily keeps where you left it.

Tips

Balance, and where these numbers came from

The house rules were tuned in a simulator: the house mastermind (rookie, everyday words) against a detective team that reasons from every mark it is shown. The aim was about 60/40 to the detectives at every table size. Since 2026-09-23 the mastermind opens with one word per guess and then lays one word a round, and the default target moved to 50. The simulated detectives still win almost every game — the pace is being re-tuned. Measured at 50 with the new pace (40 games a row, crafty house):

What moves the balance, strongest first:

• Words against guesses. Tying them together is what keeps table sizes even. At the old target of 43, going from one word a round to two flipped a two-detective game from 97% detectives to 97% mastermind.
• The target. The fine dial. Under the old words-every-round pace, around 70, every 5 points is worth roughly 10–30% to the detectives.
• The word lists. Letting the mastermind use every word in the dictionary makes them far stronger.
• The house's skill, then board size (a bigger board is worth 5–10% to the mastermind).

The simulated detectives never forget a mark, so a table of people will usually do a little worse than these numbers. If your table finds the mastermind escaping too often, raise the target; if they are caught too easily, lower it.

Differences from the printed game

This follows Jonathan Leistiko's draft of 15 August 2026 — the board, the tile set, the marking, the clue sheets and the character cards. The scoring is this table's house rules: