Explo is a modern take on the classic crossword game.
Less noise, more fun. Meet Explo, a new, fresh, free to play crossword game app with no distracting ads or pop-ups. Designed by crossword game enthusiasts for people who love word games, Explo is a pure way to interact with your friends and flex your brain.
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Play Explo — a word game without the noise
A better word game is born:
Introducing Explo
A crossword game for modern times. That was the vision of our team when we started the Explo project. Being crossword enthusiasts ourselves, we wanted to build a modern, calm and beautiful take on the classic word game. No distractions, ads, annoying pop-ups or visual noise — just pure concentration and plain fun.
The result is Explo, an innovative word game app. Play against your friends, faraway strangers or fiendish robots. Play at a relaxed pace or against the clock for an adrenaline kick. Collect Elo points and become a master, or just enjoy the ride and see where it takes you.
A modern take for more fun:
Explo dares to innovate
Explo features a new and innovative board design. It recognizes that crosswords typically progress down and to the right, more than up and to the left. The board thus has a diagonal axis of symmetry instead of being center-symmetric. The starting square is in the upper-left corner, at square D4, instead of being in the center of the board. As a result, games become more open and flow more naturally.
For even more fluidity and fun, we designed a new tile bag for English. We ran hundreds of thousands of games through a computer simulator to optimize the bag. The result is that all letters stay almost equally long in a player’s rack, on average. And a random draw of 7 tiles from the Explo bag can form 25% more valid words than such a draw from the classic English tile bag. Try it, you will like it!
Free to play, simple to buy:
A subscription is all you need
Explo is free to download and play — with no ads. If you like it, you can elect to pay a low monthly subscription fee. Subscribers enjoy the following advantages:
Play a practically unlimited number of games simultaneously.
Review finished games to see the best moves in each situation.
Invite other players to Pro Mode games where words can be challenged manually. (In Standard Mode, word validity is verified and shown on the fly.)
Like everything about Explo, a subscription is simple and straightforward. No gems or booster packs or other paraphernalia to buy or worry about — just pure word game fun, without the noise.
Play for a good cause:
Protecting the world’s languages
Explo is created by Miðeind ehf. of Reykjavík, Iceland, a software company specializing in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for the Icelandic language. Proceeds from Explo support the cause of helping the smaller languages of the world survive in a digital age.
With digital technologies becoming an ever larger part of our daily lives, smaller languages face a fresh set of challenges. Services that are readily available for the major languages of the world, such as voice assistants, machine translation, automatic subtitling and grammar checking, need to be developed for the smaller languages too. This keeps them alive and relevant, while protecting the cultural heritage that every language embeds.
Our native language, Icelandic, is one of the world’s smallest national languages. The solutions we develop — perhaps with your support — can hopefully help other low- and medium-resource languages survive in a new age.
Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson, founder/chairman of Miðeind and two-time national Scrabble® champion
