New word game Dartwords blends Wordle-style guessing with a Clippy-inspired helper
Studio The Game Band has launched Dartwords, a new daily word-guessing game featuring a Clippy-inspired character named Darty who offers clues. The hint system combines a local language model with hand-written developer clues.
The Game Band, the studio behind Blaseball, has released a new daily web game called Dartwords. The concept came from designer and creative director Sam Rosenthal, who, after regularly playing games like Wordle, began thinking about other ways to explore the word-game genre, drawing inspiration from looser, non-digital word games he played as a child on road trips.
Dartwords challenges players to guess a secret word each day within ten attempts. Unlike many similar games, players start with no initial hints — they simply type any word, and a character named Darty responds with clues. Darty resembles Clippy, the old Microsoft Word assistant, and offers feedback such as whether the target word is bigger, smaller, or man-made compared to the guess. Each guess is shown as a dart landing on a board, moving closer to the bullseye as guesses get closer to the correct answer.
The technology behind the clues
According to Rosenthal, the game's hint system relies on a custom, locally run language model trained on the English dictionary. Broader clues are generated by this model, while more specific hints closer to the correct answer are written by the developers themselves. Rosenthal also noted that the game's artwork and UI/UX were handmade, while the studio uses tools like Claude Code to speed up everyday coding tasks, paired with careful review.
Dartwords adds to the studio's varied lineup of games, which also includes Dead Man's Party, a party game available through Netflix. Rosenthal believes Darty will be a key differentiator in an increasingly crowded daily-puzzle market inspired by Wordle's success, giving the game more personality and a conversational feel.
