How Missing Link works

You get the two ends of a chain and a pile of words. Three of them belong in the middle, in one particular order, and the rest are near misses: words that genuinely link to something in the chain, just not where you want them to.

Take freezing at one end and sale at the other. The chain is freezing cold, cold front, front yard, yard sale, so the three tiles in the middle are cold, front and yard. Every puzzle has exactly one arrangement that works.

Pairs on their own are not enough. Plenty of tiles make a real phrase with one neighbour and still do not belong. Say the ends are sahara and town, and the pile holds ghost, sand, china, desert, island, resort and up. Ghost town is a perfectly good phrase, so ghost looks right in the last gap. Put it there and you need a word that makes a phrase with ghost on its other side, and there is not one in the pile. The answer is sahara desert, desert island, island resort, resort town. All four joins have to work at the same time, so the chain is one answer rather than three separate guesses.

Reading the board. Nothing is marked until all three gaps are full, so you commit to an arrangement and then the board answers. A red ✕ between two words means those two do not make a phrase, and the words either side of it turn amber: one of them is in the wrong place, and the board is not telling you which. A plain line between two words means only that the pair makes a phrase. It does not mean either word is where it belongs, because a word can make a phrase with its neighbour and still be in the wrong slot. The whole chain turns green when you have it.

Runs. A run counts the puzzles you get right the first time you fill the gaps, with no hint. One wrong check or one hint and the run goes back to zero, though the puzzle still counts as solved. Hints break a run.

Puzzles are built fresh from the same word list as Phrasicle, which means there is no end to them. The longer your run, the bigger the pile of words you get. A hint places one word for you, and it stays put after that.

Missing Link is the endless mode: no day to wait for and no streak to keep. If you want a daily instead, there are two. Today's Phrasicle is the word grid with a saying to work out at the end, and its rules are here. Common Ground is sixteen words split into four groups, each group sharing one word that makes a phrase with all four.