RUMI 3D — words on a spinning solid

A crossword that lives on the surface of a rotating 3D solid. Every edge of the shape is a word; every glowing corner is a single letter shared by all the words that meet there. Solve the surface, open the faces, and follow the words as they spiral inward to a center that was holding something the whole time.

It's a single self-contained HTML file. No build, no dependencies, no network. Open index.html in any modern browser and play.

How it plays

RUMI 3D is a three-layer dig, and a color-mixing one:

1. Edges — solve the words on the cage of the solid. Shared corners hand letters to their neighbors, just like a flat crossword, but wrapped around a shape you can spin.
2. Faces — every face carries one of three pigments: cyan, magenta or yellow. Once a face's three edges are solved, a word stretches across it, hung off corners you already filled. Solve it and the face lights up in its pigment. Edges between two different pigments mix (cyan and magenta make blue, and so on).
3. Spokes — a few faces, always covering all three pigments, send a spoke word diving from a corner to the ring at the center. Each spoke's last letter lands in one slot of the ring and carries its face's pigment inward. The paper at the center tints as pigments arrive.
4. The center — when all three pigments are in, they make ink, and the ring is yours: the spokes have spelled most of the word that every other word was circling, and you decode the rest.

Then the reward: a short authored poem, quip, or tiny story. The words on the surface are drawn from that theme, so the reveal is something the puzzle was quietly pointing at.

Before each puzzle, RUMI asks what you're bringing to the center; your answer shapes which reward waits there.

Daily puzzle and free play

• Daily — one seeded solid everyone gets on the same day (by local date). Solving it keeps a streak; the share text is spoiler-free.
• Free play — pick a mood and a shape. Every puzzle is seeded, so an unfinished game is saved in your browser and resumes when you come back.
• Hints — Hint letter and Reveal corner fill a letter and count as assists. Best times are recorded only for clean solves; Reveal records nothing.

Controls

• Drag to rotate · scroll / pinch to zoom · + / − buttons or keys to zoom
• Click a corner or edge to select a word, then type to fill it · click the corner again to switch between the words that share it
• Tab / Enter / ↑ ↓ — previous or next word · Space — rotate the selected word to face you
• ← → — move along the current word · Backspace — clear · Esc — close a dialog

On a phone the on-screen keyboard has ‹ word / word › keys and a face it key.

Shapes

Five all-triangle solids (the deltahedron family), from quick to epic:

Shape	Faces	Edges	Words
Tetra	4	6	14–15
Hexa	6	9	19–20
Octa	8	12	24–25
Deca	10	15	29–30
Icosa	20	30	54–55

Words = edges + one face word per face + 3 or 4 spokes + the center ring.

Running it

• Locally: double-click index.html (or open it in a browser).
• On the web: drop the files on any static host (GitHub Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages). On a phone, open the link and choose Add to Home Screen for an app-like icon; the service worker keeps it playable offline.
• When you deploy, bump CACHE in sw.js if you changed the icons or manifest (the page itself is always fetched network-first).

Editing the words

Everything lives in index.html:

• RAW is the word bank: ["WORD","Clue"] pairs. The same word may appear more than once with different clues; all of its clues are kept and one is drawn per puzzle.
• PAYOFFS holds the center rewards. Each has a near list, the theme words the puzzle is built from. Keep those lists long (30+) and drawn from RAW. Payoff words should be 4 or 5 letters, and avoid letters that few words end in (I, U, V) since spokes must end on them.
• MOODS maps the intent buttons to payoff words.

Credits

Designed by Frank Brannen. Built collaboratively with Claude.