WordBubble – bubble shooter word game

WordBubble is a word game take on the classic bubble shooter. Letter bubbles hang from the top of the board, and a launcher at the bottom holds your next letter. Aim, shoot and build words from touching bubbles before the wall of bubbles reaches the bottom.

There is no timer and no daily puzzle: every game starts with a random board and lasts until the board overflows. Your best scores are kept on a personal leaderboard on your own device.

How to play

1. Move your finger or mouse over the board to aim. A guide line shows the shot's path, and bubbles bounce off the side walls. Release to shoot.
2. The bubble snaps into the grid where it lands. The game then finds the longest word of 3 to 7 letters that starts or ends with the new bubble and runs through a chain of touching bubbles. Those bubbles pop.
3. Colours help you read the board: blue for vowels, red for consonants, purple for rare letters and a gold star for the joker, which can stand for any letter.
4. The next three letters are shown beside the launcher. Swap trades your current bubble with the next one, as often as you like.
5. Bomb can be used once per game: it turns your current shot into a bomb that clears the spot it hits and all of its neighbours.
6. If four shots in a row make no word, the whole wall drops down one row. The game ends when a bubble crosses the line near the bottom of the board.

Tips

• Rare purple letters (such as P, B, V, K, J, Z) add +25 points to any word they are in.
• When a word pops, any bubbles left with no link to the ceiling fall off and score 50 points each.
• Swapping is free, so use it whenever the current letter has nowhere useful to go.

Strategy

• Long words pay off far more than short ones: a seven-letter word is worth almost ten times a three-letter word. When you have room, build a chain and close the word with the final letter.
• Big scores often come from falling bubbles. Aim for words that run through the bubbles holding a cluster to the ceiling, because everything hanging below drops for 50 points apiece.
• Save the Bomb for emergencies, when a bubble is close to the bottom line, or use it on a knot that has many bubbles hanging below it.

A worked example

Near the bottom of the wall, S, T, A and R touch each other in a chain. Your launcher holds an E, so you aim next to the R. The E snaps in, the game reads STARE, and the five bubbles pop for 100 points.

If two more bubbles were hanging from the S with no other link to the ceiling, they fall a moment later and add 2 × 50 = 100 points, doubling the value of that shot.

History of the game

Bubble shooters trace back to Puzzle Bobble, an arcade game released by Taito in 1994 and known in North America as Bust-a-Move. Bub and Bob, the little dragons from Bubble Bobble, fired coloured bubbles upward, and groups of three or more of the same colour popped while the ceiling slowly crept down. WordBubble keeps the aiming, the falling orphans and the descending wall, but swaps colour matching for spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How much is a word worth?

Three letters score 30, four score 50, five score 100, six score 180 and seven score 280. Each rare (purple) letter in the word adds 25 more.

How does the joker work?

The gold star bubble can stand for any letter in a word. The starting board always has at least two, and they also come up regularly in the launcher.

What are the red X marks above the board?

They count your shots without a word. After the fourth, a new row arrives from the top and the whole wall moves down.