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words of letters share one grid — read across, read down. Find them all.
Pick a row or column, then type a word into it. The small dark squares belong to no word and are never filled.
A word played across also asks a question of every column it passes through. A guess that scores nothing in the row you chose can still be the guess that cracks a column — so a "wasted" guess often isn't.
Only every second square in a word sits on a crossing. The squares between them touch no second word, so they can never show blue.
Under the board is everything you have been told about the word you have selected: the guesses you played into it, and — separately — the letters that guesses in the crossing words put into it or ruled out of it. Switch to All guesses for the whole game.
The keyboard follows your selection too, and every key is about that one word: green is already placed in it, yellow is in it from a guess you played there, blue is in it because a crossing guess said so, and grey is out of it. Pick a different row or column and the keyboard answers for that word instead.
You start with . Every word you complete earns you one more, so finishing the grid is worth more than picking at it. Letters filled in from a crossing word count — you can complete a word without ever typing it.
A new puzzle arrives at midnight, wherever you are — one for each board size. The 5×5 and 7×7 keep separate puzzles, separate saves and separate streaks, so switching between them costs you nothing.
Seedling and Skitter are at walter.com.au, along with a storytelling card game to play with other people.
Tessera has no accounts, no tracking, and no server-side storage. The server hands your browser the page and takes nothing back.
Today's guesses, your chosen board size and your streaks — kept separately for 5×5 and 7×7 — are saved on this device only, and never sent anywhere. The flip side is worth knowing: clearing site data ends your streaks, and your stats won't follow you to another browser or phone. There is no account to restore them from.
No analytics, no advertising, no third-party scripts, no cookies. This page loads nothing from any other domain, and the server keeps no record of who played or how they did — it serves files and answers a health check, and has no database.
The site runs on Fly.io in Sydney. As with any website, their servers see the IP addresses that connect.
Tessera is run by the operator of walter.com.au, in Australia. For anything about your data, or to exercise the rights below, email admin@walter.com.au.
One piece of personal data reaches us, and only one: your IP address, which any website necessarily sees in order to send you a page. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in serving the site and keeping it up — Article 6(1)(f). Your guesses, streaks and board choice are not part of it: they never leave your browser, so there is nothing on our side to look up.
Saving your game on your device needs no consent banner. It is strictly necessary for the game you asked to play, which is the exemption the ePrivacy rules give — and that is only true because nothing else rides along with it. No analytics, no advertising, no cookies.
Where it goes. Fly.io is a US company and this site runs on its servers in Sydney, so your IP address is handled outside the EEA. Fly.io participates in the EU, UK and Swiss Data Privacy Frameworks, and its data processing agreement incorporates the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. Fly.io keeps its own connection logs to its own schedule. We keep none — there is no database to keep them in.
Your rights. You can ask for access to your personal data, or for it to be corrected, erased or restricted, and you can object to it being processed. Your browser gives you most of that directly: clearing this site's data erases every record of your play, because no copy exists anywhere else. Email admin@walter.com.au for the rest. If you think we have got this wrong, you can complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.