nwarner0

Solo project. I'm a .NET developer doing some new work but mainly maintaining legacy sites so this was my excuse to play with the Cloudflare stack (Pages, Workers, D1, KV). The game: get from a start word to a target word in as few hops as possible e.g. COLD → HOT (antonym) → SPOT (rhyme) → PLACE (synonym) → PLAICE (rhyme). Each hop must be a rhyme, synonym or antonym of the previous word. All the puzzles are human created (mainly by my wife!) so there is at least one route that works. I tried creating from scripts that daisy-chained words but the results were just not fun for some reason.

The main problem turned out to be validation. I hugely underestimated this! The validation stack ended up as: blocklist (offensive words), already-used check, stored-path check, connections payload, human-approved matches from previous games (we queue all of these to audit), WordNet subset, ConceptNet subset, extra-pairs, lemma exceptions, hypernyms, troponyms, non-rhotic rhymes. If no match found after all those client side checks we hit some APIs (Datamuse and RhymeBrain in both directions). If all else fails lemma suffix-strip, prefix-antonym check and a local rhyme check. Despite those checks there are some obvious connections that still get rejected but hopefully enough accepted ones that the player does not give up. I was quite pleased with the share dynamic; the recipient will be presented with a challenge where their result will be compared with yours at the end.

It's free, no signup, no ads. Honest feedback would be great and anything constructive even better.

Good concept. Why does it not allow the same word more than once - no way I'm going to remember.

EXPERT

Solved in 5 words

WORDGEM 22 July, 2026 | No.461

Very slick to play. I like the auto spell check which simplifies the validation. A good level of challenge where it didn't get frustrating. Personally I don't mind but other people might like a bit more visual pizzazz even if that's just some colour on the main grid etc

I enjoyed it. Not sure what happens if you put an answer in wrong, does it validate as you go? The dynamic was satisfying in that it gets easier as you go.

  — Jul 21

 My score: 1000
 16/16 correct in 3:44
 0 mistakes

Fun game. I would play this again. How do you populate the grids?

I will keep playing but that's a tough game!

Good concept. What's the incentive to not guess on the first clue. The clue is not cryptic on the one I tried so there is luck involved in hitting the target? I'm wondering if I played every day I would always guess the first then immediately have 3 clues which would narrow it down sufficiently to get it right? Or I never guess the first one and wait for the second to always have two clues?

It's a good idea. Executed well. I would say for adults it's a little easy but I think perfect for 9 years up to adult. Would be nice to be able to admire the puzzle at the end and look at stats etc

Give your son a thumbs up :-)

Just clicked through a few and it was there all the time! Nice idea

The Go-Between:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

On medium I did not even come close, but that says more about me. Every game it got SERA, ARES etc I should've learnt :-)

I found it too hard as well. After level one it's not clear how much power I'm giving the shot. I would look at angry birds and lift the way this is communicated to the user. Get this mechanic feeling 100% and it'll be great.

Good game. Found it pretty difficult but got there in the end.

I thought it was excellent. I was happy with the timer but found that I could either get a word almost immediately or not at all. Would it be possible to 'skip' ones you get stuck on? Then they are given back to you at the end or you can click on the squares to finish them (different colour for skipped) at any point? How about a letter shuffle feature? Game itself was very slick. I got 13 btw...