Our take
Semantle hides one word a day and gives you no letters at all. Each guess earns a score for how near in meaning it sits to the hidden word, worked out from how words are used together in a large body of text. Once you are among the thousand nearest words, it also shows how near you are.
That makes it a very different word game. Spelling does not matter, only meaning. Guessing "river" might score well because the answer is "bridge", and the fun is in following warm trails through your vocabulary until one leads home. It can be baffling, and the scores do not always match human intuition.
Teams let a group of friends play the same word together and see each other's guesses, which takes the edge off the hard days. There are also Spanish, German and easier junior versions.
A first sitting
Spend your first five guesses on very different words: an object, a feeling, a place, an action, a quality. The best-scoring one tells you which neighbourhood to search.
Where to stop
Today's word has an end: solving it or pressing give up. Giving up is a perfectly good ending. The archive of past words is unlimited, so it is worth deciding before you open it whether tonight is one word or several.
Worth knowing
- Its privacy text says both that it collects no personal information and that it records IP addresses and clicks, so assume the latter.
- A countdown to the next word and a streak counter are shown after each game.