Like many of us, Sam Rosenthal plays games like Wordle every day, chasing after good scores and sharing the results with friends and family. But he’s also a game designer, the creative director at Blaseball developer The Game Band, and so this regular habit got him thinking about what else could be done in the space. “When I was a kid and I played word games with my family, they weren’t the New York Times puzzle games,” Rosenthal explains. “We were sitting in a car on a road trip playing these really loose games that couldn’t be made digitally before. Things like the alphabet game or our own riffs on 20 questions. That felt like a really interesting space to explore.”
This led to Dartwords, a new daily word game that launches today on the web. Dartwords is a word guessing game: Each day there’s a secret word, and you have 10 chances to figure out what it is. To start, you have no hints. You simply type in a word — any word — and from there a little Clippy-like character named Darty will respond with clues based on your guess. For instance, you might guess a type of animal, and Darty might respond saying that the answer is bigger, or maybe that it’s manmade. With each guess a dart hits a board on the screen, getting closer to the bullseye as you get closer to the right answer.
The success of Wordle has led to a deluge of daily puzzle games, particularly in the word game space, and Rosenthal says the goal of Dartwords was to create an experience that was “more conversational” compared to its contemporaries. In order to make it work, he says that the studio built a bespoke hint engine utilizing a local LLM trained on the English dictionary. He explains that Darty’s clues are a combination of broader hints generated by the LLM and, as you get closer to the correct response, clues written by the developers. “It’s this interesting mixture of using hand-authored work and local models to get us to where we want to be,” he says.
(On the subject of AI, Rosenthal says that all of the art and UI / UX in the game is handmade, while “we do use tools like Claude Code to speed up day-to-day coding tasks, but we pair them with our taste, judgment, and careful reviews.”)
For me at least, it took a few rounds to get the hang of it. The open-ended nature of Dartwords can be almost paralyzing, as you have to try to think of a word that will get you a good hint. But eventually I started to have a better feel for how to follow up the game’s hints, and this morning I managed to get the right answer in just three guesses, a personal record. The hope is that if Dartwords becomes a success with a large player base, things will improve based on feedback and data. “Over time, with more people playing the game, our system will get better and better and hopefully serve better clues,” says Rosenthal.
Dartwords joins an increasingly eclectic lineup of games from the studio. The Game Band got its start with the narrative puzzler Where Cards Fall before launching the surreal baseball simulator Blaseball that went viral during the pandemic. More recently, the studio released Dead Man’s Party, a Knives Out-themed party game that’s part of Netflix’s current push into TV games. But with Dartwords, the studio is entering a particularly challenging and crowded space buoyed by the breakout success of Wordle. Since then, everywhere from LinkedIn to The Atlantic has started launching daily puzzle games, while platforms like Puzzmo provide their own alternative.
Rosenthal believes that one of the differentiating factors for Dartwords is Darty itself: a goofy sentient dart with big, expressive eyes and tiny hands for clapping. “Darty was literally inspired by Clippy,” he says. “The whole intent is that we wanted it to be a loose word game. It’s more improvisational, it feels more conversational. And because of that, we need something for people to get mad at if it gives you a bad clue. We want this game to feel charming and fun, and have a little more character to it than you traditionally get in word games.”
