Great questions, thanks - there is a tutorial!
There's a "bag" just like Scrabble and you're both drawing tiles from it. You can see the bag too, definitely should be visible during swapping, great call.
CPU players have heuristics and different word difficulties they play - I want to do a new post on that soon.
There's no time component... we tried that initially but felt too rushed.
Where is this tutorial? I see nothing on the link nor on wordtrak.com that really explains how to play. I tried to play Daily and I had no idea. I tried dragging tiles onto squares to spell words, no tiles stuck anywhere, gave up.
It's the ? button on each game, and on the new game screen. I'll make it more obvious. Also here: http://wordtrak.com/manual
I punted on dragging tiles since it felt janky...considering revisiting though.
> I tried dragging tiles onto squares to spell words, no tiles stuck anywhere, gave up.
I think the first move is a forced swap, though from a gameplay design perspective I'm not sure why. It took me a while to figure this out; it should definitely be made more obvious (assuming it's intentional).
Good callout. My idea here was that you commonly get a garbage hand to start the game, and this helps you build a better first word.