Wordsy
A self-hosted daily word game
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Four guesses in, with the on-screen keyboard tracking which letters are still live.
Guess the five-letter word in six tries. Everything runs in the browser: there is no backend, no account, and no telemetry. Your statistics and in-progress game live in localStorage, and the daily puzzle is derived from your device's local date, so the server never needs to know anything about you.
A vibe-coded proof of concept, and labelled as one. Written quickly, for fun, to see whether the thing could be built in an afternoon. It works and it is pleasant to play, but it has no tests, no build pipeline, and no roadmap — the README says to treat it as a starting point to fork rather than a maintained product.
Known limitations, stated up front
- The answer is in the page. With no backend, the word list and the day's answer are both reachable from the browser console. Anyone determined to cheat can. That is inherent to a client-only build, not an oversight.
- Dark theme only. The palette is hardcoded — no light mode, no
prefers-color-scheme. - Animations always run.
prefers-reduced-motionis not yet respected. - No tests. See above, re: vibe-coded.
The word lists are maintained by scripts
Two lists ship: answers that can be the daily puzzle, and words accepted as a guess but never used as an answer. Both are generated rather than hand-edited, so the editing rules stay reviewable in version control instead of living in someone's head.
One script drops plural answers, since no puzzle should resolve to a plural. Another removes slurs and crude vulgarities, and its blocklist is the content policy: it targets terms whose primary use is as a slur and deliberately keeps ordinary vocabulary that merely reads as unpleasant — “death”, “slave”, “crack”. Disagree with a call, edit the list and re-run.
Stack
| Code | index.html, css/, js/ — the entire game, no build step |
|---|---|
| Persistence | localStorage in the player's browser |
| Container | One nginx image serving static files, with assets cached for an hour so updates land without a hard refresh |
| Architectures | Multi-arch builds for amd64, arm64, and 32-bit ARM — a Pi 3/4/5 or an ARM NAS |
Not affiliated with anything. No connection to Wordle or The New York Times, nor to Wordsy, the card game by Formal Ferret Games. The name was a throwaway pun that stuck.