Wordle meets Clippy in this new word game
Wordle meets Clippy in this new word game
当 Wordle 遇上回形针助手：这款全新文字游戏横空出世
Blaseball developer The Game Band is launching a new daily puzzler called Dartwords. 《Blaseball》开发商 The Game Band 推出了一款名为“Dartwords”的全新每日益智游戏。
Like many of us, Sam Rosenthal plays games like Wordle every day, chasing after good scores and sharing the results with friends and family. But he’s also a game designer, the creative director at Blaseball developer The Game Band, and so this regular habit got him thinking about what else could be done in the space. “When I was a kid and I played word games with my family, they weren’t the New York Times puzzle games,” Rosenthal explains. “We were sitting in a car on a road trip playing these really loose games that couldn’t be made digitally before. Things like the alphabet game or our own riffs on 20 questions. That felt like a really interesting space to explore.” 和我们许多人一样，Sam Rosenthal 每天都会玩像 Wordle 这样的游戏，追求高分并与亲友分享结果。但他同时也是一名游戏设计师，担任《Blaseball》开发商 The Game Band 的创意总监。这种日常习惯让他开始思考，在这个领域还能做些什么。“当我小时候和家人玩文字游戏时，那并不是《纽约时报》那种益智游戏，”Rosenthal 解释道，“我们当时坐在车里长途旅行，玩的是那些以前无法数字化呈现的、非常随性的游戏。比如字母游戏，或者我们自己改编的‘20个问题’。我觉得这是一个非常值得探索的领域。”
This led to Dartwords, a new daily word game that launches today on the web. Dartwords is a word guessing game: Each day there’s a secret word, and you have 10 chances to figure out what it is. To start, you have no hints. You simply type in a word — any word — and from there a little Clippy-like character named Darty will respond with clues based on your guess. For instance, you might guess a type of animal, and Darty might respond saying that the answer is bigger, or maybe that it’s manmade. With each guess a dart hits a board on the screen, getting closer to the bullseye as you get closer to the right answer. 这促成了 Dartwords 的诞生，这是一款今天在网页端上线的全新每日文字游戏。Dartwords 是一款猜词游戏：每天都有一个秘密单词，你有 10 次机会猜出它。刚开始时，你没有任何提示。你只需输入一个单词——任何单词都可以——然后一个名为 Darty 的、类似“回形针助手”（Clippy）的小角色会根据你的猜测给出线索。例如，你可能猜了一种动物，Darty 可能会回复说答案比它更大，或者说答案是人造的。随着每一次猜测，屏幕上的飞镖会击中靶盘，当你越接近正确答案，飞镖就越靠近靶心。
The success of Wordle has led to a deluge of daily puzzle games, particularly in the word game space, and Rosenthal says the goal of Dartwords was to create an experience that was “more conversational” compared to its contemporaries. In order to make it work, he says that the studio built a bespoke hint engine utilizing a local LLM trained on the English dictionary. He explains that Darty’s clues are a combination of broader hints generated by the LLM and, as you get closer to the correct response, clues written by the developers. “It’s this interesting mixture of using hand-authored work and local models to get us to where we want to be,” he says. Wordle 的成功引发了每日益智游戏的井喷，尤其是在文字游戏领域。Rosenthal 表示，Dartwords 的目标是创造一种与同类游戏相比“更具对话感”的体验。为了实现这一点，他说工作室构建了一个定制的提示引擎，利用在英语词典上训练的本地大语言模型（LLM）。他解释说，Darty 的线索结合了由 LLM 生成的广泛提示，以及当你接近正确答案时由开发者编写的线索。“这是一种有趣的混合方式，结合了人工编写的内容和本地模型，从而达到我们想要的效果，”他说。
(On the subject of AI, Rosenthal says that all of the art and UI / UX in the game is handmade, while “we do use tools like Claude Code to speed up day-to-day coding tasks, but we pair them with our taste, judgment, and careful reviews.”) （关于人工智能，Rosenthal 表示游戏中的所有美术和 UI/UX 都是手工制作的，同时“我们确实使用 Claude Code 等工具来加速日常编码任务，但我们会结合自己的品味、判断和仔细的审查来使用它们。”）
For me at least, it took a few rounds to get the hang of it. The open-ended nature of Dartwords can be almost paralyzing, as you have to try to think of a word that will get you a good hint. But eventually I started to have a better feel for how to follow up the game’s hints, and this morning I managed to get the right answer in just three guesses, a personal record. The hope is that if Dartwords becomes a success with a large player base, things will improve based on feedback and data. “Over time, with more people playing the game, our system will get better and better and hopefully serve better clues,” says Rosenthal. 至少对我来说，玩了几轮才掌握窍门。Dartwords 的开放性有时会让人感到无从下手，因为你必须努力思考一个能为你带来有效提示的单词。但最终，我开始更好地掌握如何根据游戏的提示进行后续猜测。今天早上，我仅用了三次猜测就得到了正确答案，创下了个人纪录。他们希望如果 Dartwords 能吸引大量玩家并取得成功，系统将根据反馈和数据不断改进。“随着时间的推移，玩的人越来越多，我们的系统会变得越来越好，并有望提供更精准的线索，”Rosenthal 说道。
Dartwords joins an increasingly eclectic lineup of games from the studio. The Game Band got its start with the narrative puzzler Where Cards Fall before launching the surreal baseball simulator Blaseball that went viral during the pandemic. More recently, the studio released Dead Man’s Party, a Knives Out-themed party game that’s part of Netflix’s current push into TV games. But with Dartwords, the studio is entering a particularly challenging and crowded space buoyed by the breakout success of Wordle. Since then, everywhere from LinkedIn to The Atlantic has started launching daily puzzle games, while platforms like Puzzmo provide their own alternative. Dartwords 加入了该工作室日益多元化的游戏阵容。The Game Band 最初凭借叙事益智游戏《Where Cards Fall》起家，随后推出了在疫情期间风靡一时的超现实棒球模拟游戏《Blaseball》。最近，该工作室还发布了《Dead Man’s Party》，这是一款以《利刃出鞘》（Knives Out）为主题的派对游戏，也是 Netflix 目前进军电视游戏领域的一部分。但通过 Dartwords，该工作室正进入一个因 Wordle 的巨大成功而变得极具挑战且拥挤的领域。从那时起，从 LinkedIn 到《大西洋月刊》，各方都开始推出每日益智游戏，而像 Puzzmo 这样的平台也提供了自己的替代方案。
Rosenthal believes that one of the differentiating factors for Dartwords is Darty itself: a goofy sentient dart with big, expressive eyes and tiny hands for clapping. “Darty was literally inspired by Clippy,” he says. “The whole intent is that we wanted it to be a loose word game. It’s more improvisational, it feels more conversational. And because of that, we need something for people to get mad at if it gives you a bad clue. We want this game to feel charming and fun, and have a little more character to it than you traditionally get in word games.” Rosenthal 认为 Dartwords 的差异化因素之一就是 Darty 本身：一个有着大而生动的眼睛、会用小手鼓掌的呆萌飞镖。“Darty 的灵感确实来自 Clippy，”他说。“我们的初衷是想让它成为一款随性的文字游戏。它更具即兴感，感觉更像是在对话。正因如此，我们需要一个角色，当它给出糟糕的线索时，玩家可以冲它发火。我们希望这款游戏感觉迷人且有趣，并比传统的文字游戏多一点个性。”