Two Heads, One Grid
There's a particular silence in a doubles match when your partner is three letters into a word you can already see. You know the answer. You are not allowed to touch it. That silence is most of the appeal.
Making a team
A team is not a queue. You don't press play and take whoever the machine hands you. You choose a friend, you name the pair - anything from two to twenty characters - and the invitation sits unanswered until they accept. Until then, there is no team.
The naming matters more than it looks. A team carries its own rating, its own record and its own reputation, kept entirely apart from your singles rating. It starts life rated at the average of the two of you and then goes its own way. You can be a Gold singles player on a Bronze team, or the reverse, and both are true at once.
The order of play
Turn-based doubles rotates strictly: your first player, their first, your second, their second. It never hands one side two moves together, and it never lets a partnership stack its stronger solver at the front - the rotation is fixed before anyone sees the grid.
Singles extends a courtesy that doubles does not: there, the lower-rated player moves first. Here, nobody gets a head start.
The clock is shared. One bank per team, not one per player, so your partner's long think is spent from the same account as your own. There's no per-turn timer in doubles - that belongs to ranked singles. The pressure is collective, and so is the blame.
What a word is worth
Every point lands twice: once in the team pool, which decides the match, and once against your own name, which decides the MVP.
Only hidden letters pay. Fill a word whose crossings are already in place and you're paid the difference, not the whole - which is why the player who opens up a corner is often worth more than the player who finishes it. On top sits a length bonus, deliberately modest: one point for two to five letters, two up to ten, three up to fourteen, four beyond.
Fails are personal. Three each. Spend them and the game stops being forgiving - every wrong guess after that reveals a random square somewhere on the board, quite possibly one your opponents were working towards, and takes ten points from you and from your team.
One clock, two players. Your partner's long think is spent from your account too.
Winning
Most team points takes it. Level on points, the team with more clock remaining wins.
Either player may forfeit on behalf of both. Either may cancel, but only before your side has made a single move - after that you're committed, and so is your partner.
When it ends, one of the four is named MVP: the highest individual scorer on the board, winner or loser. It's possible, and quietly common, to be the best player in a match your team lost.
Free For All
There's a turnless variant in beta - no rotation, no waiting, both sides racing the same grid at once. It's on the app only for now, and it's a genuinely different game: doubles rewards patience, and Free For All punishes it.