How to play Morphink
Everything in Morphink comes out of one rule, so the rule is worth two minutes before anything else. A word is on the page. You change it into another word by touching exactly one letter. Then you do it again, and the words you make form a chain.
There are three ways to touch a letter, five ways to play, and one thing you have to be careful about. The rest of this is detail you can pick up while playing.
What counts as a move
A move is called a morph, and there are exactly three of them.
- Add a letter, anywhere in the word. OLD becomes GOLD. FOLD becomes FOLDS.
- Remove a letter, from anywhere. FOLD becomes OLD.
- Replace a letter, in place. FOOD becomes FOLD. COLD becomes CORD.
Rearranging letters is not a morph. Changing two letters at once is not a morph.
For the new word to be accepted it has to be a real word in the language you are playing, at least two letters long, and one you have not already used in this chain. That last rule is the one people meet without expecting it: you cannot go COLD, CORD, COLD, and sit there earning points off two words.
The dictionary is on your device, so the answer arrives the instant you finish typing. Nothing is checked over a network and nothing waits.
Three gestures, and one at a time
The word sits on the page as a row of tiles. Each of the three morphs has its own gesture, and they are priced by how much they change.
To replace a letter, tap it. The letter smears away, the slot opens and stays open, and whatever you type next goes in there. You can also swipe across the tile, which draws the smear along your finger. The tap is there because replacing is the common move and the common move should be the cheapest thing your hand can do.
To add a letter, tap the gap. There is a faint gold interpunct in every space between two tiles and at both ends of the word. That mark is the game's caret, it is where new letters are born, and it is the same mark that sits in the middle of the logo. Tap one and it blooms open. Type, and the letter lands there.
To remove a letter, drag the tile down. It detaches from the row and sinks with your finger while its neighbours preview closing the gap. Past the shelf at the bottom the ink goes pale and you feel a tick. Let go there and the letter is gone; drag back up and nothing happened. Removing changes the shape of the word, so it asks for a visible commitment rather than a tap you could make by accident. The backspace key does the same job if you prefer it.
Only one of these can be open at a time, and the game enforces that by taking the others away rather than by warning you. While a slot is open, the interpuncts fade out, the other tiles go quiet and will not begin a gesture, and the keyboard belongs to the open slot alone. You will never be told you cannot do something; the thing simply is not there. Tap the open slot, or anywhere outside the row, to put it back the way it was at no cost.
There is no submit button in the timed modes. The moment the word is complete it is checked.
When a word is refused
The row shudders, the ink flashes vermilion, and the tiles walk themselves back to the last word that worked. You never have to reconstruct anything by hand, and the letter you typed is not spent.
In a timed mode, three refusals inside one window ends the run. That rule exists so nobody can hammer the keyboard through the alphabet, and it is the one thing in the game that can end a run while there is still time on the clock. In the untimed modes it does not apply: refusals are still counted and still shown, and nothing ends.
Your first run teaches you all of this
A fresh install opens straight into a gentle Blitz run rather than a menu, and the first five morphs are a tutorial that says so. A card sits under the word row reading Onboarding · 2 of 5 with one instruction under it, and the instruction names the actual move on the actual word in front of you: tap the F, then type B.
There is no clock while it is teaching. Each step waits for you to make its move, and waiting costs nothing because there is nothing running. Any other valid word is fine too; it extends your chain and the step stays where it is. When the five are done the game hands the clock over and tells you in seconds how long you have, which is the one place it explains its own timing.
The run counts. The score is real, the words go into your Word Book, and the ordinary three-refusal rule is switched off for it.
The five ways to play
Blitz
Ten seconds to find each morph. Land one and the clock refills.
It tightens as you go: ten seconds for the first five morphs, nine for the next five, eight, seven, and then it holds at six from the twenty-first onward. That is the standard ladder and you can change it on the Blitz line before you start. Unhurried opens at twenty seconds and settles at twelve. Swift opens at eight and floors at four. Whichever you pick is named on your summary and on anything you share, so a score is never quietly incomparable with somebody else's.
Blitz is where you go to play again.
Daily
One word, the same one for everybody playing in that language, once a day.
It is worked out on your own device from the date, so it needs no connection and no account, and it turns at your midnight rather than at a server's. Two people on the same evening can be holding different numbers, which is why a shared link carries the number rather than the word "today".
One attempt is what counts. You can play it again and the game will let you, but it says beforehand what a replay is worth: nothing on your charts, no rank, no record, no board, no share card. The one thing a replay still does is fill your Word Book, because meeting a word is true whichever attempt it happened on. If you want to play again, that is what Blitz is for.
Finishing the daily produces the share card: the number, the depth, a spoiler-free trail of marks, and never the words themselves.
Bridge
Two words, and the fewest morphs between them. COLD to WARM.
There is no clock at all. The header tells you the par before you start, which is three to five morphs in free play, and reaching it earns gold; one over is silver, two over is bronze. Since there is no clock there is a submit button in the slot the timer would occupy.
Bridges are chosen for shape as well as length. Some are gentle and let you walk more or less straight there. Some are devious, and the road that looks right runs out under you. Which one you were given is named on the summary and never before it, because saying it in advance would give away the whole puzzle.
There is also one crossing a day: a named pair, chosen for what it means, sometimes dedicated to a real bridge somewhere in the world. It is posed with its name and one line on how the two words are related. The story behind the dedication is only told once you have reached the far bank.
Depth
One word, no clock, no target. See how far you can go.
This is the long, quiet one, and it is the mode that pairs with ambient sound if you turn it on. Late morphs are worth slightly more than early ones, because a chain gets harder to extend the further out it runs.
It ends two ways and the summary says which. Either you press Finish, which is the only mode where the game cannot work out on its own that you are done, or the chain exhausts: the word you are standing on has no legal neighbour you have not already played. Neither is a failure and both rank.
Duel
Two people, one device, one shared chain, taking turns.
Twelve seconds each by default, and the same preset choice Blitz has, set once for the match on the setup sheet so both players are looking at it. Name yourselves first if you like; every line that would say "Player 1" will say your name instead.
A turn begins when the device changes hands. An accepted morph sizes the next window and does not start it. The game stops, says whose turn it is, and starts the clock when that person taps. Without that the phone would be running somebody's clock while it was still in the air.
A round ends when a player times out or runs out of tries, and the survivor takes a bonus of a quarter of what they scored that round. Best of five. If the rounds finish with nobody holding a majority, the match goes to whoever has the most ink, and the scoreboard says out loud that ink was what chose. Equal on both is a genuine draw. A won match is signed.
There is also an online duel, and a table where you can be paired with a stranger, from the same door.
What a morph is worth
You do not need this to play, and it is the difference between a good run and a very good one.
A morph's base value is the rarity of the letter you changed plus a bonus for length. Rare letters pay more, which is why a Q is worth ten times an E. Words of five letters and up carry a bonus that grows with the word. On a replace, the game takes the more valuable of the two letters, so swapping a Z out is as good as swapping one in.
That base is then multiplied twice in the timed modes. Speed pays for the part of the window you did not use, so a fast morph can be worth double a slow one. Streak climbs a tenth for every morph you have already landed, up to double at ten in a row, and a run that ends resets it.
In the untimed modes there is no speed multiplier and no streak, deliberately, since a planning puzzle should not reward rushing. Bridge instead pays an efficiency multiplier at the end: double for gold, half again for silver, a quarter more for bronze.
One bonus is worth chasing. At the end of a Blitz or daily run the game weighs the path you actually took against the other chains of the same length that were available from that word, and a genuinely rare one earns fifteen percent of your run total, labelled Uncommon path. It rewards the road nobody takes.
What happens after a run
The chain redraws itself as a manuscript, one word at a time, with each morph's score in the margin. Tap to skip it.
Beside your column, in gold, is the Scribe's path: a longer chain from the same word, revealed word by word. It is the game showing you what was there. Every word you played is filed in the Word Book, with a one-line definition and how it is pronounced, and you can go back and read it whenever.
Over weeks, the dashboard draws four of your own numbers: your median time per morph, your longest chain, how many different words you have played, and how close your bridges came to par. It reports them and says nothing about what they mean.
Things you will meet later
Commissions. Three a week, one per mode, each a run played under a stated restriction: no replaces, say, or six words built on the rarest letters. The terms are stated in full before you accept, breaking one costs you a refusal like any other bad word, and finishing binds a page into your Folio, which is a book you can open and read and which will replay any run inside it.
The Gathering. A few days, three puzzles, everybody playing the same ones. Nobody is knocked out.
Ink Rank. Earned from morph points alone, in every mode, so no way of playing is worth more rank per hour than another. Winning a duel earns you nothing you did not morph. It unlocks ink colours and papers and touches no rule of the game.
Worth setting once
The timer preset, if ten seconds is not your speed. The keyboard order, which is QWERTY on English and AZERTY on French unless you say otherwise. Reduced motion, a dyslexia-friendly typeface, and a night page, all reachable from the first screen. Language, which changes the interface and the word list together.
A session is meant to take three to six minutes. One daily, maybe a Blitz or two. It is finished at three minutes and nothing is gated behind coming back.
Watch it played
Short videos of each mode, on our channel. Following this link leaves this site.
