Dockside Word Hunt is how half the studio starts the day. Pick a pack, and a square of letters fills the stage with ten words tucked inside. They might run left to right, straight down, backwards or along a diagonal, and you circle each one by dragging across it. Found words get a rounded coloured capsule on the grid and a line through them in the list beside it.
Every pack belongs to the lodge. There are canoe words like gunwale and thwart, kitchen words like bannock and cinnamon, birds you hear across the water at dawn, the trees along a Shield shoreline and the weather that rolls in over the bay. A different pack is chosen each morning from the date, so everyone at the lodge gets the same daily puzzle.
How to play Dockside Word Hunt
- Choose one of the twelve packs, or the morning paddle pack that changes with each new day.
- Scan the grid for the first letter of a word from the list, then look in all eight directions around it.
- Drag from the first letter to the last to circle a word; correct finds lock in with a coloured capsule.
- Press Hint when you are stuck to flash the first letter of a word you have not found yet.
- Find all ten words to finish the round and see how many stars your time earned.
Dockside Word Hunt controls
Getting better at Dockside Word Hunt
- Hunt for unusual letters first. The Q in quartz or the K in kingfisher stands out in a crowd.
- Long words are easier to spot than short ones, so clear tamarack and flashlight before log or fog.
- Remember backwards runs. If a word refuses to appear, read the grid from right to left for a minute.
- Each hint adds a little to your effective time, so save them for the last stubborn word or two.
- On a phone the grid shrinks to 9x9 with fewer words, which makes a lovely quick round on the bus.
Twelve packs written around a lake
We wrote every list ourselves, sitting on actual docks with actual notebooks. The canoe trip pack came first, because we wanted words a paddler would recognize: portage, yoke, gunwale, thwart. Lake birds followed, built from the calls we hear at dawn, from the loon to the merganser. Granite and stone is a nod to the Canadian Shield underfoot, with lichen and outcrop sitting beside the obvious ones.
Some packs are broader. Lodge kitchen gathers the smells of a cottage breakfast, stars over the bay covers what you see after the lanterns go out, and the packing list is the one we joke about forgetting. All the words are everyday English, safe for the whole family, and none repeats inside its own pack, so every find is a fresh small victory.
Stars, the clock and the morning pack
A small timer runs while you search, and your stars at the end depend on how quickly you cleared all ten. Hints are there to keep a round enjoyable rather than to punish you, but each one nudges your effective time up a little. That keeps three stars meaningful while still letting a stuck player finish with a smile instead of giving up.
The morning paddle pack is chosen from the date, so it changes overnight and stays the same for everyone all day. Friends in Halifax and Vancouver can compare notes, three time zones apart, on the same puzzle. On a big screen the grid is eleven letters wide and holds all ten words; on a narrow phone it becomes nine wide and keeps up to eight, dropping the longest first.
Questions about Dockside Word Hunt
Yes. Words can run in any of the eight directions, including right to left, bottom to top and along both diagonals. That is part of what makes a quiet grid surprisingly tricky.
Three per round. A hint flashes the first letter of a word you have not found yet, and each one adds a small amount to the time used for your stars.
On narrow screens the grid shrinks to 9x9 so the letters stay large enough to drag across. A smaller grid fits up to eight words, so the longest are left out.
