Clockwords (Walkthrough)

Much of this game is based on vocabulary and typing speed, and I can’t help there. What I can help with is creating a strong boiler and general strategy.

The most important things to recognize are:

1) Brass tiles are strong. Explosions are good.

2) Explosions are even better when you have high level letters in the same word.

3) You will never spawn two of the same letter at once, so words with duplicates aren’t helpful.

4) Since you can only repeat words every 20, it’s good to have multiple words you can make with your key tiles.

5) The fewer tiles you have in your boiler, the more likely you are to get your good ones.

Based off these 5 things, I constructed a boiler designed for spamming exactly 6 words: Quixotic, Quixotically, Exquisite, Exquisitely, Equinox, Equinoxes.

All of these words have X, Q, and U, and three of them also have a Y and/or a C. You want one of Q, X, and U to be brass. (remember that you can change the letter on a brass by mixing it with a letter of the same level)

Jade tiles, while interesting, do not add damage, and thus should not be used in your boiler, since the tiles they boost don’t explode.

I was using a Boiler that looked like this:

Q, X, Y, U, L, L, N, T, D, O, I, I, I, I, A, A, S, S, R, R, E, E

What you want to do is start by spamming words fast that use up all your letters until you get up to 6 or 7 slots free. Then spam only words that don’t have Q, U, X, or Y in them while having as many other letters as possible.

Good words for freeing up slots:

Questionably
Extirpation

Good words for clearing junk letters:

Realizations
Internationalization
Translations
Seriously
Strained
Snailed

Once you get a Q, X, U, and optionally Y in your slots, hit one of the 6 words mentioned above. Make sure to memorize what order you use them in. Then spam small words until you get all your good letters again, and repeat. Make sure to use all 6 words before cycling and go through them in the same order the second time. You can also spam tiny words like “awe” multiple times to clean out your word list so as not to suffer the damage penalty, as even duplicates will count for “last 20 words”.

Note that this strategy will get you very high scoring single words. High scoring enough, in fact, that my top score has now been deleted by Kong. Twice.

My high score of 1375 (deleted):

What a good game looks like:

Even after all of this, a lot of the game is luck. The bugs arrive in different ways each time, and some formations are a lot harder to fight than others. With my strategy, I’m stuck on level 48 out of at least 80. But this will certainly be good enough to get anything short of an impossible badge on this game.

Glad to see a stretegy discussion thread on Clockwords…… I’m at level 42 so far.

My stretegy isn’t really high-damage based…… But rather using as many letters as possible every fire while evading any damage penalty. It can still grant me ~70 avg word damage even when my highest damage is 300 only.

My current boiler (it’s constantly changing but the ingredients are mostly the same):

Iron:

A A D G G I I N N N O R R R S S T

Brass:

A E G G I I N R S T T

Jade:

A E N O P R

As you can see they are all level 1 and 2 letters (except jade P). They have lower damage but you can use a lot of them on almost any word you can think of.

There’s a very important rule in the game that can be exploited: any change on one word is seen as another word. Sorry I’m not very familiar with grammatical terms, so I’ll just give an example:

close, closing, closes, closed

All these are the same word, but you won’t get an “already used” when you type these once each.

Combine this with my boiler. Now try this combo:

generate, generates, generated, generating, generation, generations, generator, generators

regenerate, regenerates, regenerated, regenerating, regeneration, regenerations, regenerator, regenerators

degenerate, degenerates, degenerated, degenerating, degeneration, degenerations

Any verbs you can think of, convert them to past tense and progressive tense.

Bask in your 70+ average word damage and 8+ average word length.

EDIT: Just found that generative, regenerative, and degenerative also work.

Fundamentally, one should think of this game as a deck-building game, rather than a vocabulary game. One should try for a group of 8 letters, find a bunch of words that contains those 8 letters, and spam those forever. (Theoretically if what Zerris says is true, all you need to do is find a set of 8 letters such that there are 20 words that contain all 8 of those letters, and then go through that list one by one for the entire game: the constant stun should be enough to carry your for a long time.)

Every time I think a good, difficult game has been uploaded, someone finds a strategy that blows it all into the dust.

I’m not particularly good at this game otherwise.

I was honestly rather sad to find out that duplicates couldn’t spawn. My brilliant strategy of using the word “razzmatazzes” to score 2000+ points died a painful death.

You can, though. It just grants you a whooping 90% damage penalty.

No, that’s not the problem. The problem is that since only one Z can spawn at a time, it won’t do any damage. If all 4 Zs could spawn, I’d just hit it, then spam two to three Z words like Pizzas and Pizazz.

i cant stand these school/spelling type games

I can’t stand those school/shooting type games

What causes some spiders to drop “Found Words” that then go into the boiler?

I really like this game, but giving it badges is another step against non-English speaking community… Especially kids from other countrys. It’s not like it’s their chance to learn, it’s a task they simply can’t and won’t do. :/ And yeah, sure, no one needs 100% badges, but the thing is that this advantage for people from English speaking countrys is just unfair. Just thinking, not complaining. :>

What causes some spiders to drop “Found Words” that then go into the boiler?

Randomness.

My boiler has three each of I, N, G, L, and Y (preferably jade or brass), and whatever else I feel like putting into it at the time. Currently I’ve got an X (“exactingly”, “exasperatingly”, “exceedingly”, “excitingly”, “excruciatingly”, “exiling”, “inexcusably”), a couple of F’s and U’s (“fatefully”, “fitfully”, “frightfully”, “gleefully”, “gratefully”, “tastefully”), and some easy letters like S, A, and T.

Originally posted by poisonthewell:

i cant stand these school/spelling type games

Originally posted by Zerris:

I can’t stand those school/shooting type games

It’s better to try new things.

how on earth do you transmute? it’s driving me mad now, all the combo’s of letters I try aren’t in the “formula” grrrrr

People having trouble with transmuting: Don’t put the letters in the grid boxes, put them in the green bottle at the top of the screen.

An arbitrary game with easy letters in the boiler, feel free to use some of the words:

I’m just finding the word penetration quite the most amusing one, from such a wordy list.

I like the words:

Electroencephalograph(ically)
Electropositive
Electronegative etc…

(un)copyrightable – all letters different
dermatoglyphics – same

X letter words , z letter qords.

Some basic advice.

1. Focus on 7-8 letters. More letters makes it difficult to plan.
2. Find an anagram server or a dictionary and make a list of at least 15-20 words that are fairly useful and use that. Write that list down so you don’t have to think about it when you are playing.
3. If you have a useful word, try variations of that word also.

For example, my boiler is stinger times 3, which roughly equal mixtures of brass/jade/iron. Words I use include

Restring, restrings, Stingers, Stingier, Stringer, Stringers, Stringier, Transgressing, Transgression, Transgressions, interesting, uninteresting, stressing, resetting, regretting, resisting, greeting, greetings, arresting, gesturing, astringent, staggering

None of those will get you more than 300-400, but you’ll average 100 damage per word easily with a lot of stun.

Enormous words (like sesquipedalian)? High-level letters? Many brass, jade and good letters? I got 123 with “whacky”. Just one brass.

Got 1828 max word damage with ‘Quizzicality’, all jade except for brass Q and U. Trick is waiting for a nicely clustered critical mass of targets.

Originally posted by Darth_Sirov:

I’m just finding the word penetration quite the most amusing one, from such a wordy list.

It was totally plural.

Any decent way to farm new letters? :S I have no idea how you guys get so many brass/jade letters.

Originally posted by y0ttabyte:

Any decent way to farm new letters? :S I have no idea how you guys get so many brass/jade letters.

You will get half of your boiler brass or jade after you die work your way to lv 25 or so. Just keep trying the latest level (unless you can’t kill more than 10 before dying in that level) – later levels tend to drop more high-level or even brass or jade letters.