About SameWord

The version people play in group chats needs a referee. Somebody has to remember the seed word, decide whether jade and jade rabbit count as the same answer, keep track of which round it is and stop a round from dragging on. SameWord does that part automatically: it holds the timer, the reveal, the same-meaning vote and the chain from one seed word to the next.

The rest is deliberately small. There's no lobby to browse, no friends list, no profile and nothing to unlock. A room exists while people are in it and disappears after 6 hours with no visitors, so there is nothing to clean up later.

The pages are plain HTML, one stylesheet and one small script. There's no account system and no app to install. A room is identified by a six-character code; the people who have the code are the people who can join, up to the 2 to 4 player limit chosen when the room was created.

Rooms run on Cloudflare's network, in one small server process per room, so there's no database to leak and nothing to log into. Words are shown to the players in that room, and to nobody else. When the room expires, the words go with it.

One game is 5 rounds, each round is 30 or 60 seconds, and a word can be 1 to 24 characters long. Those four numbers are the rule set in miniature.

There is no AI opponent, no leaderboard and no library of games. It's one game with one rule set, and the rules are short enough to learn in a round: one seed word, one secret word each, five rounds, and a room that has to agree on what counts.

Wondering whether a rule matters before you play? The full set is on the rules page. If you want the shorter version, the home page has the game panel and a four-question summary.