Word Relay
Word Relay is a free daily word puzzle you play in a browser. Type a word on your physical keyboard or tap the on-screen one; letters type, Enter submits and Backspace erases, and those three things are the entire control scheme. Every guess colors each letter three ways: teal when the letter is in the right place, amber when the letter belongs somewhere else in the word, and gray when the word does not contain it at all. There are five difficulty tiers, from Sprout for young readers to Inferno for people who want to lose, and each tier gets its own fresh puzzle at midnight Eastern time. The whole page is about 24 KB gzipped on first paint, runs offline after the first load, and requires no account - nothing you play is ever sent anywhere.
Play Word Relay
Choose a difficulty tier
Standard is preselected. You can switch tiers later from the menu, and every tier keeps its own separate statistics.
How to play
- Pick a difficulty tier on the start screen. Standard is preselected; your choice is remembered in this browser for next time.
- Type any real word of the right length. Letters go in from your keyboard or from the on-screen one, and Backspace takes the last one back.
- Press Enter to submit. If the word is not in the dictionary the row shakes and nothing is spent, so a typo never costs you a try.
- Read the colors. A teal tile means that letter is in exactly that position. An amber tile means the word contains that letter, but somewhere else. A gray tile means the word does not contain that letter at all.
- Watch the on-screen keyboard, which carries the same colors forward across every guess, so you can see at a glance which letters are already ruled out. Inferno is the exception: it leaves the keyboard uncolored on purpose.
- Use what you learned. In hard mode - optional on Standard, forced on Brutal and Inferno - any letter you have already revealed has to appear in every later guess, in the position you proved if you proved one.
- Finish the word before the tries run out. Win or lose, you can copy a spoiler-free result grid to your clipboard with one button, and come back for a fresh puzzle at midnight Eastern.
What each difficulty tier changes
- Sprout - Four-letter words a young reader knows, eight tries, the first letter is filled in for you, and the puzzle never ends in a loss. There is no clock, the on-screen keyboard grays out letters you have already used, and running out of rows earns you more rows and another revealed letter instead of a failure screen.
- Casual - Five-letter everyday words with eight tries instead of six, so there is room to spend a guess on exploring letters. Answers come from the same common-word list as Standard.
- Standard - Five-letter everyday words in six tries: the classic Word Relay puzzle, with hard mode available as a toggle rather than forced on you.
- Brutal - Six-letter words in five tries, and hard mode is forced on, so every clue you uncover must be reused in your next guess.
- Inferno - Seven-letter words pulled from the entire dictionary in five tries, hard mode forced, the on-screen keyboard stays uncolored, and each guess is on a 90-second clock. Let the clock run out and the row is burned with no information given. Most players will never finish it, which is the point.
Features
- A new daily puzzle for every tier, derived from the Eastern date and the tier name, so every player worldwide gets the same word and the tiers never spoil each other.
- Five difficulty tiers, from a no-fail Sprout mode built for young kids to a deliberately punishing Inferno.
- An unlimited practice mode that draws a random word whenever you want another one, and never touches your daily streak.
- Duplicate letters scored correctly with a two-pass algorithm, so a letter already counted as a correct position is never also reported as being somewhere else.
- Hard mode, optional on the first three tiers and forced on the last two, which requires every revealed clue to be reused.
- A spoiler-free emoji result grid with the day number, the tier name and your streak, copied to the clipboard with one button.
- Per-tier statistics: games played, win rate, current streak, maximum streak and a guess-distribution bar chart, every one of them labeled with the tier it belongs to.
- Light and dark themes plus a color-blind-safe palette that swaps teal and amber for blue and orange.
- Tile flip animations staggered a quarter of a second per letter, a shake on an unknown word and a small bounce on a win, all of which stop if your system asks for reduced motion.
- A 41,000-word validation dictionary and 15,167 possible answers across the four word lengths, shipped as front-coded local data and loaded one tier at a time.
- Full keyboard operation, visible focus rings and no flashing, meeting WCAG 2.1 AA.
- Runs offline after the first load, stores everything locally, and requires no account.
Frequently asked questions
Is Word Relay free, and do I need an account?
Word Relay is completely free and there is no account, no sign-up, no email address and no payment of any kind. Open the page and the difficulty picker is already waiting for you. Your streak, your statistics and your tier choice are written to your own browser's localStorage and never leave the device, which also means they do not follow you to a second computer. There are no ads and no paywalled tiers: all five are unlocked from the first visit.
Which difficulty tier should I choose?
Sprout uses four-letter words a young reader knows, gives you eight tries, fills in the first letter for you, and never ends in a loss. Casual uses five-letter everyday words and gives you eight tries instead of six, so there is room to experiment. Standard is the classic Word Relay puzzle: five-letter everyday words in six tries. Brutal moves to six-letter words in five tries and forces hard mode, so every clue you uncover has to be reused in your next guess. Inferno uses seven-letter words drawn from the entire 12,000-word dictionary, gives you five tries, forces hard mode, leaves the on-screen keyboard uncolored and puts a 90-second clock on every guess. You can switch tiers at any time from the menu, and each tier keeps its own separate statistics and streak.
When does the daily puzzle change, and does everyone get the same word?
The puzzle rolls over at midnight America/New_York, which is Eastern time, and the same rollover applies wherever in the world you are playing from. Everybody gets the same word because the word is not sent by a server: the browser turns the current Eastern date and the tier name into a number, and that number picks the answer out of the tier's answer list. The same date and the same tier always produce the same word on every device. Because the tier name is part of that calculation, the five tiers never spoil each other.
How does Word Relay handle a word with the same letter twice?
Correctly, and it is worth spelling out because this is the detail most word games get wrong. Scoring runs in two passes. The first pass marks every letter that is already in the right place and removes that letter from a running count of what the answer still has left. The second pass only then looks at the remaining letters, so a letter that has already been counted as a correct position can never also be reported as being somewhere else. If the answer contains one E and your guess contains two, exactly one of them is marked, and it is the one in the right place if either of them is.
Does Word Relay work offline and on a phone?
Yes to both. Tap the on-screen keyboard on a phone or tablet, or use your physical keyboard on a desktop: letters to type, Enter to submit, Backspace to erase. After your first visit a service worker caches the page, the stylesheet, the script and the word lists, so the game runs offline with no network connection at all. There are no server calls during play, which is why it keeps working on a plane or in a basement, and why the daily word still resolves correctly with the network switched off.
How was this game made?
Word Relay was generated from a single prompt on Quodara, an AI agent platform that turns one written description into a deployed web app. The prompt described the scoring rules, the five difficulty tiers, the daily word derivation, the sharing format and the accessibility requirements, and Quodara built the word lists, the game, the page and the server, then deployed it to this domain. You can read the full write-up, including the prompt that produced it, at https://quodara-ai.com/showcase/word-relay/.
About this build
Word Relay was generated from a single prompt on Quodara and deployed on August 22, 2026. A first paint transfers about 24 KB gzipped in total, of which roughly 12 KB is JavaScript; the tier you pick then fetches one word list of between 5 and 26 KB gzipped, and nothing else is ever requested. There is no framework, no bundler and no third-party script on the page: the whole thing is hand-written HTML, CSS and one JavaScript file served by a Python standard-library process. The full write-up, including the prompt that produced it, lives at https://quodara-ai.com/showcase/word-relay/.