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r/WordyBunch

▲ 12 r/WordyBunch

500 members today. Thank you 💛

Wordy Bunch passed 500 members this morning and I've been sat here for a while not sure how to write this one.

500 is a strange number to look at. It's 500 people who decided a small daily word game was worth a few minutes of their day. Plenty of you play every morning and never post a thing, and I can see you in the numbers.

I make this on my own. Leaderboards, streaks, titles, duels, the Arena. Most of the work is tiny stuff nobody will ever notice, and there are weeks where I wonder if any of it lands. Then someone posts a score or drops a thank you and I remember why I'm doing it.

There's a full version on iOS and Android as well, with a campaign to work through and live battles against other people, which is the sort of thing I could never fit into a Reddit post. It's at wordybunch.co.uk if you fancy it.

The sub has its own league now too, called Karma Farmers. September is the first full season and it starts from scratch, so getting in now means you're there from day one. Scoring goes off where you finish each day rather than your raw score, so a rough day still puts something on the board as long as you turned up.

Two codes, because a league is tied to the word list you picked when you set the app up. Pick the wrong one and it just tells you, and if you want to be greedy you can switch regions once per day and then potentially participate in both leagues as well as both leaderboards.

Pick the wrong code and it just tells you, nothing breaks.

UK: AKM8ZR

US: SSHM44

Tap the right one on your phone and it sorts itself out. There's more on how it all works in [the league post]

And one thing, if you can spare a minute:

**If you could change or add one thing in Wordy Bunch, here or on the app, what would it be?**

A whole new mode, or just something that quietly irritates you every day. One line is plenty. Some of them I won't manage. I read all of them though, and what comes back here shapes what I build next.

Thanks for playing 💛

u/Dry-Royal7707 — 1 day ago
▲ 8 r/WordyBunch

**120 titles now, and nobody has found a single Secret yet**

The Titles tab in your profile used to hold 24. It now holds 120, and whicheverone you are showing sits next to your name. You can pick a favourite or leave it on automatic, which always shows your strongest.

They come in three groups, and they behave differently on purpose.

* Game titles, 80 Open the tab and each one tells you what it wants. A few of you will already have some without having noticed.

* Prestige, 20. These are stunts, and they are meant to be awkward. Each one tells you exactly what it wants and then dares you. A few of them:

* Lipogrammatist score at least 50 without using the letter E in a single
accepted word.

* No Loose Ends find every valid three letter answer on a board that has at least ten of them.

* Alliteration Station ten accepted words starting with the same letter in
one Daily.

* Full Spectrum words of length 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 or more, all in the
same round.

They are all doable in one board. That is the trick of them. You have to give up scoring well to go after most of them.

Secrets, 20. These work differently to anything else in the game, so this bit
is worth reading properly.

An undiscovered Secret shows you nothing at all. Not a name, not a locked silhouette, not a hint. There are twenty slots and they are simply blank.

The moment anybody finds one, it opens up for everyone.

Its name appears, the reason behind it appears, the date it was first found appears, and so do the names of the players who found it. Permanently, in every single player's collection.

And it is not a race for one person.

Everyone who finds it on that first day is recorded as a founder, together.

If six of you crack the same one on the same board, all six names go up. Anyone who gets there later still earns the title, they just do not get their name on it.

Look at the two numbers in that section. "Yours" is how many you hold.

**"Found" is how many the whole subreddit has uncovered between us.**

Both are on zero.

**What unlocks them is not in the game's code.**

It is not in the database, it never reaches your browser, and it never gets written to a log. It sits in one encrypted setting the game reads and never repeats back. I built it that way so I could not leak them by accident, and so nobody can find them by reading the source.

That is why I wanted the founder list to hold more than one name. I did not want twenty private puzzles solved alone in twenty bedrooms. I wanted people comparing notes in the comments, someone saying "I got one right after doing this, did anyone else", and a few of you getting there together on the same day.

I am not going to confirm guesses. That would spoil it for everyone including me.

You can also post your title card to the Title Gallery, which resets every six
months.

---

One small thing

Reddit does pay developers, but those funds are a long way off for a game this
size, and right now Wordy Bunch earns me nothing at all. I build it because I
enjoy building it, and that has been enough so far.

You may spot a Support button in your profile.

**Please ignore it for now.**

It went live before it was finished and it does not yet give you what it says it does, so I would rather nobody used it until I have fixed that properly. I will say when it is ready.

The thing that actually helps costs nothing. Say the name somewhere. Drop a comment when word games come up in another subreddit, post a board you were proud of, or tell one person who would like this sort of thing. For a game this size that does more than the Gold does.

Somebody in here has played 63 of the last 64 days. I still find that slightly astonishing. Thank you for your support and playing everyday.

reddit.com
u/Dry-Royal7707 — 3 days ago
▲ 6 r/WordyBunch

the first Arena knockout is done, here are your Cup winners

first proper knockout week is done. congrats to:

Championship Cup: u/basherrrrr, who takes the Weekly Arena Crown with it
Challenger Cup: u/Least_Resolution_674
Contender Cup: u/Wallace_B

basherrrrr put up 226, then 239, then 273 across the three rounds. u/EdsMum and u/Billz_The_Big_Dog both got to a final as well. and Least_Resolution_674 knocked me out in the semi 88 to 77, which i am handling well.

now the awkward bit. all three of you were meant to be revealed together in a post on friday. that post never turned up, because i never actually built it. the titles and flair went out on schedule, Crown included, so if you won something you do have it, you just got it in silence. that one's on me.

a couple of other things were murkier than they should have been. the pinned Arena post only ever said the Cups were decided, with no names on it, so unless you opened the Arena yourself you had no idea what had happened. it's also locked, so there was nowhere obvious to ask.

which is really why i'm posting. first run of the format, a fair bit of it guesswork, and i want to know how it read from your side.

did you even clock that a tournament was running? did you follow your Cup through the week, or enter once on the saturday and forget about it? and is three Cups too many for the number of us playing, would one bracket with everyone in it just be better.

if you played it and it felt like nothing much, say that too. easier to hear now than after i've built another month on top of it.

reddit.com
u/Dry-Royal7707 — 5 days ago
▲ 6 r/WordyBunch

made a league for the sub, it's called Karma Farmers

someone over in r/wordgames posted asking if anyone else played this and dropped their friend code. i added them, a couple of others jumped in, and one of them said a league sounded fun. so.

it's called Karma Farmers, which felt about right for a reddit league where the whole thing is grinding points every day.

there's two of them, because a league is tied to your word list. if you picked UK when you first set the app up you want the UK code, US the other one. put the wrong one in and it just tells you it's for a different region, nothing breaks.

Karma Farmers UK: AKM8ZR

Karma Farmers US: SSHM44

to get in: open the app, tap Leagues, type the code into the box next to Join. or tap the link on your phone and it does it for you.

UK https://wordybunch.co.uk/league.html?code=AKM8ZR

US https://wordybunch.co.uk/league.html?code=SSHM44

scoring goes off where you finish in the league that day rather than your raw score. top 10% of everyone in the league who played that day gets 5 points, then 3, then 2, and 1 for everyone else who played. so a rough day still puts something on the board as long as you turned up. that was the bit i cared about, otherwise it's the same two people at the top all month and everyone else quietly stops opening the app.

anyone who joins today starts on tomorrow's puzzle, so nobody's sat there with a week of points on you. join later in the month and the daily you've already played that day counts straight away.

august is nearly two thirds gone so treat this one as a shakedown. september is the first full season.

reddit.com
u/Dry-Royal7707 — 8 days ago
▲ 6 r/WordyBunch

Who are you rooting for???

The semi-finals of this week’s Arena are underway, and the race for each cup is heating up.

Championship Cup

  • u/basherrrrr vs u/Advanced-Newspaper83
  • u/EdsMum vs u/Dario-in-the-Barrio

Challenger Cup

  • u/Least_Resolution_674 defeated me 88–77 and is through to the final!
  • u/Overall-Mistake-2583 has also reached the final, advancing by a bye after no-shows in the quarter-finals.

Contender Cup

  • u/Wateroffabacksroll2 vs u/Billz_The_Big...
  • u/Wallace_B is already through to the final, advancing by a bye after no-shows in the quarter-finals.

Whether you competed this week or didn’t qualify for the Arena, you can still get involved. Tap any completed match in the bracket to explore its details, play the same board yourself, and compare your stats with the Arena entrants. Those who took part but didn't qualify can also revisit completed matchups to see how their performance stacks up.

Who are you backing to win each cup? Drop your favourites below!

u/Dry-Royal7707 — 9 days ago
▲ 17 r/WordyBunch

we need to talk about FART

so it turns out you can't play FART in wordy bunch. someone found this out the hard way and yes, i owe you an explanation our friends from r/fartology demand it lol

the dictionary is a standard word list with a blocklist on top that i went through by hand before launch. the game runs inside family subreddits so i was pretty ruthless about anything that could put a slur or something genuinely nasty on someone's board. trouble is, when you're binning hundreds of words in one sitting you stop weighing each one, and fart got swept up with stuff that actually deserved it. it was sat in the list between some proper filth, poor thing

anyway, wrong call. fart is a perfectly good word and i'm putting FART and FARTS back in the dictionary. the boards are getting rebaked now so they can actually turn up and score, should be live in the next update

FARTING is still blocked though. i've got to draw the line somewhere haha (before anyone else quits I’ve added this too lol)

Ending on a genuine note there is a post about words like this that are genuinely not on the approved word list of you ever come across one that should be in but isn’t just give me a shout I’ll sort it out.

Farting out o7

reddit.com
u/Dry-Royal7707 — 12 days ago