How to play
You start on one word. The word at the top of the screen is the goal you need to reach.
The words gathered around are related to the word you're standing on.
Tap one of them to move to it. The words gathered around will change and relate to the new word.
The puzzle is to navigate from the starting word to the goal, using the relationships between words.
Reading the board
- wordThe word you are standing on.
- wordA word related to the word you're standing on.
- wordA word you have already visited.
- wordThe goal.
A new pool every day
Every pool of words is cut from a large dataset. The pool is replaced once every 24 hours.
New deals a fresh start and goal from the same pool.
Codes
Every puzzle has a four-digit code. Share the code to challenge a friend to the same start word and goal. The challenge is only valid during the daily pool, as that four-digit code will lead to an entirely new set of words the next day.
Moves and par
Par is the shortest route from your start to the goal, worked out the moment the puzzle is dealt. Moves is what you have actually spent. Arriving on par means the board could not have been walked in fewer. Hint says how many steps still lie between you and the goal.
Licence
Wordspool is © Coubrough Games. The game is ours: its design, its code, and the way it puts a word on a screen. The vocabulary is not, and could not be: it comes from two open datasets, and the game would not exist without either.
- Open English WordNet, © the Open English WordNet team, licensed CC BY 4.0, and derived in turn from Princeton WordNet.
- ConceptNet 5, © Luminoso Technologies and the ConceptNet contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
The links between those words are machine learned rather than taken from either dataset: a language model is asked which ordinary words connect to each one, and an answer is kept only when the word it names is already in the vocabulary. No relation is named and no sense is pinned — a move is a move.
The vocabulary the level on this page is cut from descends from ConceptNet, so the level data is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0 in turn. Both word lists have been modified on the way in: phrases dropped, a few hundred words culled for taste, and no sense or definition kept. Neither project endorses this game.
For all issues or questions, please contact us at admin@wordspool.app.