The Tilewright board
Tilewright is played on a 13×13 grid — 169 squares — carrying 45 bonus squares arranged with 90° rotational symmetry. This page is the whole layout: the counts, the multipliers, the map itself and the 96 tiles that play on it.
How big is the board?
13 squares by 13, so 169 in total, with the star at 7,7 in the exact middle. An odd-sided grid is what lets a single centre square exist at all, and a 13-wide board keeps the longest word you can lay in one line to 13 letters — long enough for anything in the dictionary that matters, tight enough that the board fills and the endgame arrives.
You hold 7 tiles at a time. Using all 7 in a single turn pays a bonus of 45 on top of the word.
What are the bonus squares?
There are 45 of them, in four kinds. Letter bonuses apply to the tile sitting on them; word bonuses multiply the whole word after every letter bonus in it has been counted.
| Mark | Square | Effect | Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3W | triple word | ×3 word | 8 |
| 2W | double word | ×2 word | 9 |
| 3L | triple letter | ×3 letter | 4 |
| 2L | double letter | ×2 letter | 24 |
| Total bonus squares | 45 | ||
The centre star is one of the 9 double-word squares, which is why every opening word is doubled before anything else happens to it.
Why a pinwheel instead of a mirrored layout?
The bonus squares have 90° rotational symmetry and no mirror symmetry: turn the board a quarter turn and it is identical, hold it to a mirror and it is not. The premium squares therefore sit in arms sweeping out of the centre rather than in matched left-right pairs.
It changes how a game opens. A mirrored board rewards the same shape played in either direction, so both players tend to reach for the same lines; a pinwheel makes each quadrant a different problem, and the triple-word squares in the corners stay approachable from one diagonal for much longer. It also makes shutting the board down genuinely hard, which is what gives the strongest opponent tier something to do.
The full map
Every square, as the game deals it — 8 3W, 9 2W, 4 3L, 24 2L. The map below is generated from the same table the board itself is built from, so it cannot drift from what you play on.
3W triple word · 2W double word · 3L triple letter · 2L double letter
What are the 96 tiles worth?
The bag holds 96 tiles: 93 letters and 3 blanks. Values run along a ladder of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11 — no other value exists, which keeps mental arithmetic possible mid-turn.
| Points | Letters | Tiles |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A×8 E×10 I×6 L×4 N×5 O×7 R×6 S×4 T×6 U×7 | 63 |
| 2 | B×2 C×2 D×4 G×3 M×2 P×2 | 15 |
| 3 | F×2 H×2 W×2 Y×2 | 8 |
| 4 | V×2 | 2 |
| 5 | K×1 | 1 |
| 8 | J×1 X×1 | 2 |
| 11 | Q×1 Z×1 | 2 |
| 0 | blanks | 3 |
| Total in the bag | 96 | |
A blank can stand for any letter but always scores nothing, even on a letter bonus. It can still sit under a word bonus and double or triple everything around it.
Is this board a copy of another game?
No. The 13×13 grid, the 45 bonus squares in their pinwheel arrangement, the four multiplier kinds in the counts above and the 96-tile distribution were all worked out for this game — that is the whole reason this page exists and lists every square rather than asking you to take our word for it.
Letter-tile word games are an old and open category, the way trick-taking card games are. What belongs to a specific product is its specific board and its specific tile set, and neither of ours is anyone else’s.