Your steps are the only currency.
Six hundred steps mints one letter. Ten a day is the ceiling, so nobody out-walks you into a better board. One board a month, one word to start it, the same word for everybody. What you do with it is on you.
THE WHOLE GAME · 36 SECONDS
No tutorial. Just watch it once.
Six hundred steps mints one letter. There is no other way to get one.
Three come up. You keep one. The other two go back to the pool.
Place it against what is already down — every tile it leans on scores again, in your word.
That’s the whole day.
Surplus steps buy swaps — 2,000 each, three a day at most. Never another letter.
Ten a day and the letters stop. Nobody out-walks you into a better board.
Staging is free. Committing is forever — there is no undo in Stepwords.
One board. One month. Then it’s gone.
Share the shape, not the letters. Nobody can copy your board from it.
One board a month, from the same word as everybody else. Then a new one.
THE RULES · ALL OF THEM
Thirteen lines. There is no fourteenth.
If a rule isn't here, it isn't in the game. No energy timers, no boosters, no letter packs, no streak you can lose.
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01
600 steps, one Draft
Your pedometer is the only faucet. Nothing else in the game produces a letter.
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02
Three up, one kept
Every Draft offers three letters from a weighted pool. You keep exactly one.
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03
Ten Drafts a day
The cap lands at 6,000 steps. Walk further and you earn swaps, never more letters.
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04
Ten tiles on the rack
Hit ten and you must play before you draw again. Hoarding has a hard edge.
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05
One seed word a month
Everyone on earth starts from the same word on the same 19×19 board.
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06
Every run must be a word
Including the ones you make by accident. The move fails as a whole or lands as a whole.
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07
Crossings score twice
A tile that sits in two words counts in both. That is where the points actually live.
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08
No undo
Stage freely, rearrange freely. Once you commit, it is on the board for the month.
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09
The board resets
At the end of the month the board closes and your leftover tiles do not carry over.
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10
Words read across and down
Left to right, or top to bottom. Never backwards, never diagonally — the same way a crossword reads.
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11
One line, no gaps, touching
A move's tiles go in a single row or column with no holes, and must touch what is already on the board.
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12
ENABLE decides
173,000 words, public domain, bundled in the app. Every season records the list it was played under.
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13
The day ends, and takes its drafts with it
A draft you do not claim is gone at midnight — it does not bank and it does not become swaps. Ten tiles is also the rack, so once it is full, walking earns nothing until you play.
WHERE THE STEPS COME FROM
Your phone counts. We read the number and forget where it came from.
The count is read on the device and turned into letters there. It is never uploaded, never logged, and there is no endpoint on our server that accepts a step count — so there is nowhere for one to go, even by accident.
iPhone
Apple HealthWhat it reads
Your step count from Apple Health, which is already on every iPhone. Nothing else — not workouts, not heart rate, not location.
If you carry a watch
Apple Health already has those steps, so they count without anything extra to set up.
If you say no
The phone's own motion counter takes over. It sees less, because it only counts steps taken with the phone on you, and it needs nothing installed.
Android
Health ConnectWhat it reads
Your step count from Health Connect. It is a shelf rather than a counter: it holds whatever Google Fit, Samsung Health or Fitbit has written to it.
Before it has anything
Health Connect ships empty, and stays empty until you connect an app that writes steps. Until then Stepwords reads the phone's own counter instead, so the game works from the first walk.
If you say no
Same thing — the built-in counter. Every Android phone since about 2013 has one, counting in a low-power chip whether or not the app is open.
No background tracking. Stepwords reads your step count when you open it, and does nothing at all while it is closed. Read the privacy policy.
WHAT WE SELL
We sell how it looks and what you keep. Never how well you can play.
Free to play
Every letter, every swap, every share, and account backup so a board survives losing your phone. The month you are playing is never behind a plan.
Structural, not generous
The Daily Cap exists so walking further can't buy an advantage. Selling letters would break the same rule from the other side.
Pay-to-win is impossible
Not discouraged — impossible. Stepwords cannot be pay-to-win by construction. The plan sells history and decoration, never a tile, a swap or a point.
One annual plan
A single subscription, billed once a year, priced by the App Store or Google Play. When the month rolls over the board you just finished locks, and the plan is what reopens it — along with the animated replay, tile themes, your word statistics, and the scores and ranking on your friends board. Holding a friend code, sharing it, adding a friend, and seeing what those friends have built and when they last played all stay free.
What a share looks like.
The share is the shape of your month with the letters stripped out. It survives being 200 pixels wide in a group chat, and it gives nothing away. These four are examples — the first season is running now, so nobody has a finished board to show yet.
September has 5 days left in it.
Start now and you still get a board. Start in October and you start level with everyone.