Heart gain
Heart gain is how you win health back in the middle of a game. Emptying your Heart Gain Alphabet hands you a heart.
Heart Gain Alphabet
The number under a tile is how many more times you need that letter. Every correct word ticks down the letters it contains, twice for a letter it uses twice.
The last counter reaching zero pays out the heart and immediately rebuilds the alphabet one step harder.
A payout is wasted when you are already on sixteen hearts.
Letters that are left out
English drops the apostrophe and the hyphen, Japanese the small kana and the long vowel mark, Hindi the vowel signs. They still turn up in words, they just never take a tile.
Letter counts
| Room | Letters start at | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| Normal | 1 | 2 |
| Event | 1 | 4 |
| Ranked or hard regen | 3 | 5 |
Every heart you take adds one to the starting number for the alphabet that follows, until it reaches the ceiling.
The heart counter
This is how many hearts one game will ever give you.
| Source | Effect on the cap |
|---|---|
| Base, normal room | 8 |
| Base, ranked or hard regen | 5 |
| Each Alpha | plus 1 |
| Ranked perks | Can raise the cap, or switch heart gain off |
At the cap, emptying the alphabet pays nothing.
Alpha
The arrow only moves when your word starts with the letter it is pointing at. Pushing it all the way round is an Alpha.
Each Alpha adds a point to your heart cap and drops the difficulty back to where it started. Alphas also raise the xp of every word you type after them, up to ten Alphas and 6.75x.
Where it applies
Original and Chain Word, and always in ranked. Tournament rooms never pay out.
Rooms that support it have a Heart Regen setting: off, normal or hard. Ranked rooms always run it.
Teams and perks
In team rooms your words tick down your teammates' alphabets too, converted into their letters when they play another language. Their payout still needs a word of their own.
Perks are ranked only. They raise the cap, shave every counter down, strike your rarest letters off in red, or hex everyone else's heart gain off for a stretch of turns.