How Scoring Works in CrossEights Daily

July 24, 2026

Understanding the scoring system is the key to climbing the daily leaderboard. Here's exactly how every point is earned.

Player-entered letters: 5 points each. Every letter you type into the grid yourself — without a hint revealing it — is worth 5 points. This is where the bulk of high scores come from.

Hint-revealed letters: 1 point each. When you use a hint and letters appear in the grid, those cells are worth only 1 point each. Hints help you make progress, but they come at a scoring cost.

Unused hint bonus: 10 points each. You start with 5 hint rounds available. Every hint round you don't use earns a 10-point bonus. If you solve the puzzle with only 1 hint used, that's a 40-point bonus from the 4 unused rounds.

The first hint is special. Instead of revealing a single letter, the first hint lets you choose 2 vowels and 2 consonants. The grid reveals every instance of those 4 letters — often uncovering a large chunk of the puzzle in one move.

The scoring tension: Hints reveal letters (1 pt each) that you could have entered yourself (5 pts each). So every hint both helps and hurts — it gives you information but replaces potential 5-point cells with 1-point cells. The best scores come from using as few hints as possible while still being able to complete the puzzle.

Insight Bonus: up to 10 points per word. Solving a word from just a few crossing letters is the heart of CrossEights, and the Insight Bonus rewards exactly that. When you complete a word, you earn extra points based on how many of its letters were already revealed at the moment you finished it:

10 points — only 3 letters revealed (peak insight)
6 points — 4 letters revealed
3 points — 5 letters revealed
1 point — 6 letters revealed
0 points — 7 letters revealed (only one letter left to guess)

Because the bonus applies per word, a strong solver who cracks several words from sparse patterns can stack a meaningful total — top daily players routinely add 40+ points from Insight Bonus alone. It's a direct reward for pattern recognition and vocabulary depth.

Speed bonus: up to 50 points. Daily puzzles reward fast solvers with a tiered time bonus, calculated against the median solve time for that day's difficulty tier. The faster you finish relative to the median, the bigger the bonus:

50 points — finish at least 60% faster than the median
45 points — finish at least 55% faster than the median
40 points — finish at least 50% faster than the median
30 points — finish at least 40% faster than the median
25 points — finish at least 30% faster than the median
15 points — finish at least 20% faster than the median
10 points — finish at least 15% faster than the median
5 points — finish at least 10% faster than the median
0 points — finish less than 10% faster than the median

Median solve times vary by difficulty: roughly 2:47 for Easy, 3:07 for Medium, 6:03 for Difficult, and 5:25 for Special Blend. Your speed bonus appears in the score breakdown on the completion screen so you can see exactly how much time earned you.

Time as tiebreaker. When two players have the same final score, the faster solver ranks higher on the leaderboard — so even after the speed bonus is applied, every second still counts when scores are close.