Solitile keeps solitaire’s hands — draw, stack, move, reveal — and swaps out what the cards mean. Instead of suits and ranks you get words, and each one belongs to a hidden family. Working out which words go together is only half of it; the other half is board management, because a family you can name is useless if you have nowhere to put it. It rewards planning over speed, and there is no reflex in it anywhere.
Written by Shawn Liu, founder & puzzle designer.
Here is the most useful thing to know, and it comes straight from how the deals are built: the board is laid down in bands of three — exactly the number of goal slots. The three crowned cards you can see when the deal opens are always the three families that clear first, and the top of the draw pile is already stacked with their words. So the opening is not a puzzle. Open all three crowns, immediately, before you try to finish anything.
After that the board is genuinely yours to solve, and the strategy page is where the real game is — why the goal slots are a trap, why the columns decide the deal, and a jammed board taken apart move by move. The mechanics — what the crowned cards do, which drops are legal, how many families can be open at once, and which move costs nothing — are on the how-to-play page, with a deal walked through end to end. The interactive tutorial runs the same ground on a real board.
Solitile has fewer goal slots than it has families, which means slots get reused, which means the order you clear things in actually matters. That single design choice has a nasty consequence: shuffle the cards at random and most deals are simply unwinnable — some family ends up stranded with nowhere to land, no matter how well you play.
The usual fix is to deal randomly and throw away the boards a solver rejects. Solitile does the opposite: it starts from a finished board and deals backwards. The families are shuffled into a completion order, cut into bands of three — one per slot — and laid in from the bottom up, so the band that clears first ends up on top of the tableau and at the head of the draw pile. That gives the deal a route through it by construction, and the route is then replayed through the real game engine, move for move, to prove the deal is solvable rather than assume it.
What it does not give you is a script. Inside a band the words are shuffled together, split between the pile and the columns, and dealt across all four columns, so there is no tidy layer to peel off and no fixed sequence to follow. The bands tell you which three families are live. Everything after that is yours to work out — which is the part worth getting good at.
A pleasant side effect is that a Solitile board is a pure function of its date. There is no generator run, no solver search, no pre-built bundle to ship and no backend to ask — the day’s deal is worked out on the spot, identically on every device, and the archive can never run out of content or drift out of sync.
A new deal arrives every day at midnight Eastern. The weekday sets the size — Monday deals the fewest families and the shortest words, and the count and the word length both climb toward the weekend, where a board can carry seven families at once against only three open slots. Since July 2026 each day is an authored pack rather than a slice off a word list: a light theme tying its categories together, with the most recognisable word in each family placed first so the association has somewhere to start.
The last seven days stay free in the archive. Older deals, back to launch in June 2026, come with a subscription. If the word-association half is what you came for and you’d rather have it without the card management, Tilerdle is the other side of that coin.