Palingrid

Palingrid was published on itch.io in September 2026 by bexmakesgames and is played on the maker's own site. The idea comes from a pen and paper game the maker's mother invented decades ago. She helped build the browser version and, the itch page says, is almost always first on the leaderboard.

Each day brings one tray of 25 letter tiles, the same for every player, and an empty 5x5 grid with exactly 25 cells. You drag tiles onto the grid one at a time. A word scores in any of eight directions: left to right, right to left, up, down and along all four diagonals. Shorter words inside longer ones are counted as well, so GRASP along the top row also gives RASP and ASP. In our game a three letter word was worth 1 point, a four letter word 2 and a five letter word 3.

The words you have found build up in a list beside the grid, and a bar across the top marks your score against a row of milestones, with your best for the day under it. The game is built in Godot and runs in the browser on a desktop or a phone. A shuffle button mixes the tray, and the menu holds the rules, a dark mode switch and links to the game's Reddit, Discord and Twitch.

There is no sign-up to play. The leaderboard asks for a name of 3 to 16 characters before it shows you, either as a guest or through an account with its provider, Cheddaboards. The game shows no ads, and the maker takes tips through Ko-fi. It suits players who like squeezing points out of a fixed set of letters, as in Bongo or Sqword, with the extra puzzle of reading words backwards and on the diagonal.