How To Play 7-DOWN

In 7-DOWN, you race against the clock, trying to guess a set of words or phrases one letter at a time. If your guess is correct, the letter pops on the screen wherever it occurs. If your guess is incorrect, bad things happen to you--as shown in a graphic.

What You See on the Screen

At the top of the screen, you see two buttons:

Below that, you see the play area:

[Image of the play area]

The play area has a graphic on the left (the cartoon showing you trying to push a boulder uphill) and five "boxes" on the right: CATEGORY, GUESS THIS ITEM, LETTERS TO TRY, TIMER, and SCORE.

Playing the game

When you are ready, click the START button. After a few seconds, you will see a dialog box that specifies what type of words and phrases you are trying to guess. Click OK to continue.

The CATEGORY box will now show an appropriate label.

The GUESS THIS ITEM box will show a row of equals signs ("="). Each equals sign stands for a letter of the alphabet.

The TIMER box will have a number of seconds, counting down. This is the remaining time you have to guess the current item.

The SCORE box will show a score of 0.

Don't waste any time!

Type a letter that you think is part of the word or phrase. Or if you don't have any idea, try one of these high-frequency English letters: E, T, A, I, O, N, S, H, R.

If your guess is correct, the letter that you typed will pop up in the ITEM box and replace the corresponding equals signs. For instance, if you typed A, and A were in the second and fourth positions of the word, the second and fourth equals signs would be replaced by A's.

If you guess is not correct, something bad will happen to you in the graphic on the left. (The boulder will probably push you down.)

In either case, the letter you typed will be crossed out in the LETTERS TO TRY box.

If you make seven wrong guesses, the graphic will give you a "SORRY ..." message, and the correct answer will appear in red letters.

If you run out of time, the correct answer will appear in red.

Each time you play the game, you try to guess a specific number of words or phrases. At the end of the game, the dialog box will give you your total score.

Replay the game by clicking START again. Every time you play the game, you may get different items (that belong to the same category) presented in a different sequence.

See the list of 7-DOWN puzzles

Try the Interactive Strategies 7-DOWN puzzle