A daily word game that runs offline — and teaches you a word

There's a reason the daily-puzzle format took over. One puzzle, the same for everyone, once a day — it's a small shared ritual you can't binge and burn out on, and a two-minute habit that's easy to keep. We wanted one that fit the rest of what we build: free, no ads, no account, and running entirely on your device. So we made Daily Word — guess the five-letter word of the day in six tries — and in building it, the same on-device principle we apply to everything turned out to shape the whole design.

One word a day, with no server

The obvious way to serve 'today's word' is to ask a server for it. We don't. The puzzle is chosen by a deterministic seed derived from the date, so every visitor's browser computes the same word for the same day, entirely offline. There's no request when you load the game and no request when you play it — the word list ships with the page, and your device does the rest. It's the same trick the original daily word games used before they were acquired, and it means the game keeps working even with the network off.

Your streak stays yours

Because there's no server, there's nowhere for your results to go — and that's the point. Your current streak, your win history, and today's in-progress board all live in your browser's local storage. Refresh the page and your progress is still there; clear your browser and it's gone, because it was only ever on your machine. When you finish, you get the spoiler-free emoji grid to share if you want to — the score, none of the answers.

Learn a word while you play

The one thing we added on purpose: the moment you finish a round is the moment you're paying the most attention, so that's when the game hands you something to keep. Every answer comes with its definition, revealed when the round ends — a small, genuine fact attached to the little hit of solving it. The idea is that a daily habit should leave you slightly better off than it found you, not just entertained. It's a modest start, and it's the direction the rest of the games are heading.

Built to be its own thing

A note for anyone who notices the family resemblance: the mechanic — guess a word, get per-letter feedback — is a genuinely open idea, and cloning a game mechanic is fair. What isn't fair is copying another game's name, colours and look, so we didn't. Daily Word has its own name, its own palette (blue and orange, which also happens to be kinder to colour-blind players than the usual green and yellow), and its own word list written by us. Come play today's at /games/daily-word — and check back, because a geography guesser and a this-day-in-history puzzle are next.