About Padamz
Padamz is a daily word puzzle. One word is hidden each day, you get six tries to find it, and every guess is answered with colours that tell you how close you were. That much will be familiar to anyone who has played a word game before. What makes Padamz different is what happens when you play it in an Indian language.
Why it exists
Most word games treat a language as a row of letters. That works for English and Spanish. It falls apart in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali and Gujarati, where the unit people actually read is not the letter but the akshara — a consonant and its vowel sign, written and read as one shape. Games that ignore this end up asking players to guess Unicode code points, which is a spelling test for computers rather than a word game for people.
Padamz is built the other way round. One tile holds one akshara. The keyboard composes aksharas the way an Indian keyboard does — you pick a consonant, then its vowel — so what you type is what you would write by hand. Feedback is given on the akshara and on its two halves, so the game can tell you something no letter-based game can:
You guessed వి, the answer has వా. The tile comes back half coloured: the consonant వ is right, the vowel sign is not. You have learned something real about the word, and you have learned it in one guess.
That single rule is why the game is worth playing in your own script rather than in transliteration, and it is the thing the whole app is built around.
The ten languages
Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, English, Spanish and Dutch. Each has its own curated word list and its own keyboard; switching language switches the whole game, not just the interface. Every list is checked by hand against a dictionary before it ships — a daily word that nobody recognises is worse than no game at all.
If you play an Indic language, you can also type by roman spelling: entering
pa gives you ప. It is on by default and can be switched off.
Four games, one app
- Daily Word — the main game. One word a day, six tries, in whichever of the ten languages you choose. Two sizes: Easy and Hard.
- Wordz Hunt — the word you just solved, hidden in a drawn scene. A Forest, a Park, a Reef. Tap around to find its letters; poking an empty bush costs nothing, so exploring is free rather than punished.
- Set Wordz — a sliding-tile puzzle. Push the rows and columns until your board matches the target and the words appear. Fewer moves, more stars, and the clock never runs out.
- Chill Wordz — a blast board. Pop groups of matching blocks to spell the word one letter at a time, for points and diamonds. No clock and no way to lose.
The three extra games use the same word lists as the daily puzzle, which is the point: they are ways of meeting the same words again, not a separate app bolted on.
What Padamz does not do
There are no accounts and no sign-up. Your streak, your statistics and your settings are stored in your own browser or phone, and nothing about you is sent anywhere. We count anonymous events — a session started, a puzzle finished, in which language — with no identity and no IP address attached, and you can switch even that off inside the app. The details are in the Privacy Policy.
Where to play
padamz.com works in any modern browser, installs to a home screen, and keeps working offline once you have visited. There is also an Android app. Both are free — the website carries a small number of ads, and the Android app has none at all.
Who makes it
Padamz is built and maintained by one independent developer, not a studio. Bug reports, dictionary corrections and requests for a language are read personally and are genuinely welcome — the fastest way to improve a word list is someone who speaks the language telling us what is wrong with it. Write to info@padamz.com or use the contact page.