Facebook Cheat: Word Twist, Ladder Mode — How to Get the Top Spot

Word Twist is a great game on Facebook that my wife and I have spent too much time playing. While playing it in “ladder mode” today, where the irritatingly high scores of your so called friends are displayed for you as motivation or something, I stumbled on a cheat that let’s you see the answers and then play the exact same board again.

Spoiler alert: if you do this, the game will become slightly less interesting than before.  And yes, I included a picture of the results below.  Hey Word Twist people: this is a bug.  You should fix it.

1. Log in to Facebook.
2. Go to Word Twist.  If you don’t play it regularly, simply go the search box in the upper right and enter “Word Twist”.
3. Click on “Ladder Mode” on the menu.
4. Select either 6 or 7 letter, your choice, and start the round.
5. When time runs out, or when you click “I’m done”, you’ll see all the words and a dialog that says “Challenge Friends” or “Play Again”.  Record all the words so you can use them in your cheat.  Then, click on Challenge Friends.
6. Here’s the run part: click you back button.
7. Select the same 6 or 7 letter game.
8. and BAM! you should have the same board you did just a second ago.

This worked for me on Firefox 3.0.5 on Mac OS X 10.5.6.

The challenge is now finding a board with enough potential words for you to make a good score.  In some extremely unscientific testing, six letter games tended to come up with more six letter words for me.  Each maximum length word is worth 25 bonus points, so those are where you can really rack up the points. As you can see on the image below, mine had four of these and a total for 45 words.  Nice!

Yes, this certainly does take some of the amusement out of the game, or ladder mode at least.  Incidentally, my “natural” high score before this was 93.