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FiveWords - Snip! Blog
17th August 2025


Snip away letters to leave the clue-count on each row, in the hopes of forming a Five Word phrase.
You can Play Snip in the FiveWords engine.

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View on YouTube

How to Play



Each row has a number, and that shows how many letters should be left on that row.
Each row's leftover letters form a word, and the five words should form a phrase.
Find the originating phrase and you'll beat the day's puzzle.

This game was actually inspired by my current work on the Picross stuff. I kept wondering if I could make a randomised Picross game, and the idea of having it be word based seemed kinda fun.

Obligatory AI Usage Disclaimer



The originating phrases were "generated" using .. frankly, I used as many Chatbots as I could get my hands on, for this one.
I asked each one to generate a list of Five-Word phrases, with each word being no more than 5 letters long.
Most of them gave me 7 or 8 word phrases with 6 or 7 letter words in them.
Over and over and over.

I gathered all their outputs, over 3000 phrases in all, and bundled them into a text file.
Next I used a sanitiser, (which I wrote.. BY HAND..) to remove any phrase that needed punctuation, had any "naughty" words, had anything other than exactly 5 words, and that had any >5 letter words.
It also stripped out everything that had more than 2x 4+ letter words, because, a lot like Picross, the challenge lies in figuring out the words. If all the words are 4 or 5 letters long, it kinda defeats the purpose.

Having pushed everything through, I was left with about 800 or so phrases, and then I had to do the inevitable and read through the entire list, to ensure they actually "read" properly.
There was an awful lot of "Yoda" in the phrases, as the Chatbots struggled to fit phrases into 5 words. "I had nice day today", and "The Tree was large green", etc, etc
It also had a knack of cutting phrases at 5 words.. "A long time ago in", and "Where no man has gone"
If that wasn't enough, it would randomly pad phrases out with "now!" at the end.
"You lose a life now", "You must not fall now", "It is a trap now", "Wind in my hair now" and on and on..

So, yes, although I did use the AI to generate the phrases, good grief, did it take bloomin' ages to go through it, and filter through the garbled mess that the AI's had created.

By the end of all the work, I was down to less than 400 workable phrases.

Crazy.

You can Play Snip in the FiveWords engine.
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