The Game Band launches Dartwords, a Wordle-inspired daily word game

Each day, players get 10 chances to guess the secret word. They begin with no hints, type any word they choose, and Darty responds with clues such as whether the answer is bigger or manmade. Every guess lands a dart on a board, moving closer to the bullseye as the player gets closer to the answer.

Sam Rosenthal, the game’s creative director, said the idea came from family road-trip word games. “When I was a kid and I played word games with my family, they weren’t the New York Times puzzle games,” he told The Verge. “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.”

To generate clues, the studio built a bespoke hint engine using a local LLM trained on the English dictionary, according to Rosenthal. Darty’s responses combine broader hints from the LLM with clues written by developers as players near the correct answer. “It’s this interesting mixture of using hand-authored work and local models to get us to where we want to be,” he said.

All of the art and UI/UX is handmade, Rosenthal said, adding that the team uses tools like Claude Code to speed up coding tasks but pairs them with its own taste, judgment, and careful reviews.

Wordle’s success has brought a wave of daily puzzle games, from LinkedIn to The Atlantic, as well as platforms like Puzzmo. Rosenthal said the goal for Dartwords was to be “more conversational” than its contemporaries.

The Game Band began with the narrative puzzler Where Cards Fall, then released Blaseball, which went viral during the pandemic. Its latest title before Dartwords was Dead Man’s Party, a Knives Out-themed party game for Netflix.

Rosenthal said Darty was “literally inspired by Clippy.” “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.”