Spider Words is a connect-style word puzzle game. Various insects and small animals need the player's help to escape spider webs. The player frees each animal by creating words of three or more letters with letter tiles.
The insects and other small animals include a dragonfly, a bee, an ant, a butterfly, a mosquito, an orchid mantis, a weevil, a fly, a ladybug, a grasshopper, a beetle, an assassin bug and a snail. The player creates words across levels in animal-based groups called packages.
The words don't usually relate to the theme. The player reviews the round-cornered tiles on a central playfield and thinks of words that have the same number of letters as empty spaces per word below the field. The player connects the tiles with white arrows in horizontal and vertical directions.
Spider Words sometimes positions a letter in a spot that requires the player to remove a word below the letter to drop it into a new position. The player receives a back arrow button to undo a bad move. They also receive three special hints accessible via a lightbulb hint button.
The player can only use hints with coins they earn at the end of each level and as a bonus when they create extra words. The hint tool prompts the spider to help the player by crawling across the letters of a word and highlighting each tile with red, dropping down from above to reveal the first letter of a word on the tiles, or crawling across the empty spaces to reveal the first letter of one or more unknown words.