How to Play The Dartwords Game

Each puzzle hides one secret word, and you have ten darts to find it. A throw is one English word typed into the box: the game ranks it against the secret word and the dart sticks in the ring that matches that rank. Words the game does not know and words you have already thrown bounce back without costing a dart.

Closeness is about meaning, not spelling. The board ranks every word in a vocabulary of about twenty thousand common English words by cosine similarity to the secret word, using word vectors learned from real text. Words that turn up in the same kinds of sentences, such as a tool and the job it does, rank close even when they share no letters. Rank 1 is the secret word itself, and each ring below covers one band of that ranking.

How to play

1. Type any English word and press Throw. You have ten darts for one secret word.
2. Each dart lands on the board by meaning: the closer your word is in meaning to the secret word, the nearer the bullseye it sticks.
3. Use the ring each dart hits and the ranked list of your throws to steer the next guess toward the centre.
4. After two misses, clues start to unlock: category, word type, length, related words and letters.
5. Hit the bullseye by guessing the exact word within ten darts to win. Running out of darts reveals the word.

What the rings mean

The clue ladder

• After 2 misses: the word's category.
• After 3 misses: its word type (noun, verb or adjective).
• After 4 misses: how many letters it has.
• After 5 misses: a related word.
• After 6 misses: its first letter.
• After 7 misses: a second related word.
• After 8 misses: its last letter.
• After 9 misses: a third related word.

How clues build up

Every dart that misses the bullseye counts toward the clue ladder, and earlier clues stay on screen. By your ninth miss you can see the category, word type, letter count, first and last letters and three related words at once. Related words are the secret word's nearest everyday neighbours in the vectors, skipping near-spellings that would give the answer away. Once you know the ladder, the strategy guide shows how to make each clue count.

Daily, archive, unlimited and numbered puzzles

The daily puzzle gives everyone the same secret word for each UTC date, and no daily word repeats within 261 days. The archive keeps every date since launch, so a missed day is still playable. Unlimited deals a random word whenever you want another round, and the numbered library holds 300 fixed puzzles: a number always hides the same word, so you can send one to a friend and compare darts.

Ranked daily play

Only daily dates can rank, when the leaderboard is available. Sign in before your first dart: the server then records every throw and times the round itself. Darts thrown before signing in leave that date unranked. Wins rank by fewest darts, then solve time; a lost round never ranks. Unlimited and library rounds cannot enter the daily rankings.

Does a misspelled or made-up word cost a dart?

No. A word outside the game's vocabulary is rejected without using a dart, and so is a word you have already thrown in the same round.

Why did a word that looks similar land far away?

Rank depends on meaning, measured from how words are used in text, not on shared letters.

When do I get the first clue?

The category appears after your second miss. Each further miss adds one clue, up to a third related word after nine misses, so your tenth dart always has the full ladder.

Is the daily word the same for everyone?

Yes. Each UTC date has one secret word, so every player throws at the same word that day, and the archive keeps it under that date afterwards.