At r/FlexBard, a word from Shakespeare’s works becomes a puzzle for you to solve. Once you crack it, you get the definition, a citation, and the line from the play it came from.
Free to play on Reddit. No registration required.
I pick the word each day, and would welcome your feedback.
u/theforkliftdev
I built a word puzzle that reads the room. Deploy it to r/FlexWord and you get the standard experience: Daily FlexWord, FlexPlay, FlexArena. The game I've been shipping for months. Deploy the same app to r/FlexPlayCozy and it detects the context, swaps the UI, and delivers a low-stakes cozy version. Same solving logic underneath, but it genuinely feels like a different game. The third sub, r/FlexBard, uses curated Shakespearean words with a citation card showing the play, act, scene, and line where that word appears. Same puzzle engine, completely different flavor. All of this runs from one codebase. Reddit's Devvit platform handles the branching based on which subreddit the app is running in. I'm a 59-year-old forklift driver who codes on days off, and honestly this is the thing I'm most surprised actually worked. All three are free and live on Reddit:
If you play one, drop a comment in the sub. If you build on Devvit and want to talk through how the context detection works, I'm around.
FlexPlay now shows you the definition after every round.
Extreme Mode players kept hitting words they’d never seen. Now the dictionary is right there when the round ends, no googling needed. Definitions come from Wordnik, which also supplied the original word list, so even the most obscure words are covered.
Play a round and tell me the weirdest word you get and if the dictionary helped.
I think we need to add DOX and its family of words to the list. I was playing a challenge against my wife the other day (nothing makes you feel older than saying, the other day), and I got caught in the dreaded _O_ER trap. Sooo many words to choose from and my brain wasn’t working well. Couldn’t come up with any of these:
POWER, LOWER, TOWER, MOWER, COWER, ROWER, SOWER.
And on top of that, I couldn’t think of:
ROVER, ROGER, COVER, HOVER, LOSER, HOMER, and POKER.
The answer was DOWER, which my wife, who beat me at the challenge, btw, says she learned from living with me.
One of the words that I tried was DOXER. Not in word list. DOXED, nope. That got me thinking that those words, and their whole family, should be on the list, including:
DOX DOXED DOXER DOXES DOXING
Add in the alternate spelling, DOXX and DOXXER, DOXXED, DOXXES. (DOXXING is seven letters, and, thus, beyond FlexWord three-to-six letter lists.)
Can you imagine trying to solve DOXXED in Extreme mode? Brutal.
Dox is slang for the malicious release of private information, most frequently on the internet. It comes from a shortening of documents to docs, then, a slangification of docs to dox, or doxx.
Difficulty Bands
In FlexWord, difficulty is determined by frequency of use. The wordfreq database stopped collecting data in 2021 (Thank you, LLMs!), so I have to go on intuition.
Here’s what I propose:
Easy none Normal DOX, DOXED Hard DOXER, DOXES, DOXING Extreme DOXX, DOXXED, DOXXES, DOXXING
Including DOX and DOXED in the Normal band is not an editorial. Sadly, it’s too widespread a practice, but these are the two most common uses. The other forms of DOX belong in Hard. DOXX and its forms deserve to be in Extreme, because it’s used much less frequently.
Can you imagine trying to solve DOXXED in Extreme mode? Brutal. DOXXED has to be one of the most difficult words to solve, right?
>TLDR: FlexWord lets you change the difficulty of its word puzzles. You can play as many puzzles as you want. It’s fun, free and lives here on Reddit: r/FlexWord.
FlexWord and similar games use two word lists: a large list of valid guesses, and a smaller list of words that can actually be the answer. Every answer is a valid guess, but not every valid guess is an answer. Some games, like Wordle, have staff pick one word a day. Love the game? Wait until tomorrow. Others, like some here on Reddit, run on pure user-generated content, which is the opposite extreme, and it shows with comments like, “This one again?”
FlexWord takes a different approach. There are three modes within the game. For Daily FlexWord, I pick a word that I think will be fun to solve. In FlexPlay, you choose the difficulty, and the computer picks a random word for you. Finally, FlexArena puts you head-to-head against another player on the same random, private word.
In FlexPlay users can solve as many word puzzles as they want. They can adjust the word length from three to six. They can adjust the number of guesses from three to twelve, and they can choose whether a bot assists them in picking their next guess.
Difficulty is built on frequency data that reveals how often a word shows up in real human writing. The data comes from wordfreq (Robyn Speer, 2022, CC-BY-SA). Common words land in Easy. Rare and obscure words land in Extreme. Nothing arbitrary.
The four bands:
Easy mode is for cozy practice. Save Extreme for when you want a true challenge.
FlexWord's word list is public on GitHub. If a word is missing, or to debate its use, r/FlexWord is the place to say so.
Play some word puzzles and let me know what you think.
Edit: typos, run-ons and formatting
I was in FlexPlay mode, playing a 5-letter difficult game and PYREX was the target word (Difficult mode randomly chooses a word from the entire word list, not just a subset of pre-screened, accepted targets.) PYREX is a brand name, a registered trademark for glass cookware. But it's also one of those words that many people use generically. The FlexWord word list is built on the Wordnik list, which includes words with trademark origins if they've crossed into general usage. By that rule, PYREX probably qualifies. Has PYREX made that leap? What about outside the United States? Is PYREX recognized internationally? Let me know your thoughts.
FlexWord is a word game that lives inside Reddit, built using the Devvit SDK. It's a reimagining of what Josh Wardle (/u/powerlanguage) originally designed, but with a few twists.
One of them is this: there's no team of expert editors privately deciding what counts as a real word. It's just me, a forklift driver who built a word game, and I need help keeping it honest.
The word list is [public on GitHub](https://github.com/forkliftdev/wordlist). If a word is in there that shouldn't be, or a perfectly good word is missing, you can open an issue. That's the whole contribution process.
The list goes through a frequency-ranked pipeline, so difficulty is based on how commonly a word appears in real writing. Not arbitrary judgment calls. Rare words end up in harder modes. Common words in easier ones.
Also, after a tough solve (six or more guesses), the game prompts you to rate the word: fair, tough, or obscure. Those ratings feed back into future puzzles.
If you've ever played a word game and thought "that's not a word?" or "how is that word not accepted?" this is the game where you can actually do something about it.
[Play FlexWord on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/flexword) | [Word list on GitHub](https://github.com/forkliftdev/wordlist)
I found Shashi Tharoor using Majority of these words in his speech. Do you know any books with such vocabulary?
