The complete rules, scoring and strategy for the daily word chain puzzle.
NetWords gives you two words that have nothing obvious to do with each other, and asks you to build a bridge between them. You do it one word at a time, and the only thing that matters is meaning — not spelling, not letter count, not anagrams. If two words mean similar enough things, they connect.
Play today's puzzle →Every puzzle starts with two anchor words, shown in the two anchor colours at opposite sides of the board. Your job is to join them into a single connected network by typing words that sit between them in meaning. The moment an unbroken chain of links runs from one anchor to the other, the puzzle is solved.
Suppose the day's anchors are OCEAN and SKY. Those two are not similar enough to link directly, so you need stepping stones. One chain that would work:
Each neighbouring pair clears the similarity bar: an ocean is made of water, rain is water, rain comes from clouds, clouds are in the sky. Three typed words were enough to bridge a gap that looked unbridgeable. This example is an illustration rather than a real puzzle's answer — no spoilers here.
The useful habit: don't try to leap to the far anchor. Grow outward from both ends toward the middle, and watch which of your words is getting closer to the other side.
Every link on the board is labelled with the similarity between the two words it joins, printed to one decimal place. The number is a cosine similarity between the two words' vectors in a language model — a measure of how alike their meanings are, judged from how the words are actually used across a very large amount of English text. It is not a synonym lookup and not a thesaurus, which is why the scores are sometimes surprising.
40% is the cut-off. A pair at 40.0% links; a pair at 39.8% does not, and the board shows you that near miss honestly rather than rounding it away. Seeing the exact figure is the main feedback loop in the game: it tells you whether a word was nearly right or badly wrong.
While the two sides are still separate, a dotted line shows the closest pair of words across the gap, labelled with their similarity. It is your distance gauge: as your chains grow toward each other the number climbs, and when it finally reaches the threshold the line becomes a real link and the puzzle is solved.
A standard puzzle gives you 15 guesses. A guess is spent on every valid submission, connected or not; typing something that isn't a recognised word costs you nothing, so typos are forgiven. Running out of guesses before solving ends the puzzle — the board is spent, and you can move on to another puzzle or take one of the offers to keep going.
A hint reveals one word that would genuinely help, along with its definition. Hints are deliberately drawn from words that sit on a useful path, so a hint is a real step forward rather than a random noun. Asking to see a hint you have already revealed is always free — it only costs again when you want a new word.
There is a second ending: the board holds at most 50 words. Reaching that limit ends the puzzle even if you still have guesses left, because a full board has nowhere to put another word. It is a rare ending, and it takes real persistence to meet it.
| Shortest path | The fewest links the puzzle can be solved in — the puzzle's par. Beating or matching it is the real measure of a good solve. |
|---|---|
| Words used | How many words you put on the board to get there. |
| Hints | How many words you had revealed for you. |
| Streak | Consecutive days solved. Miss a day and it resets. |
When you solve a puzzle the winning chain lights up one word at a time, and the Solved window offers a share summary: your chain drawn as coloured squares, plus those four stats. It never includes the answer words, so it is safe to post.
Every puzzle has its own address. Puzzle numbering starts at #1 on 1 July 2026
and advances by one each day, so networds.app/?game=26 opens puzzle
#26 directly — handy for sending a friend the exact puzzle you just played. The
address bar always shows the puzzle currently on screen, and the Solved window
has a Copy link button that pins the link for you.
A daily word puzzle about meaning. You are given two anchor words and you connect them with a chain of words of similar meaning, where two words join at 40% similarity or higher.
A new puzzle every day, with its own number and its own permanent link.
Yes — free in any modern browser, with no account needed. There is an optional subscription that removes the guess limit and opens the full archive of past puzzles, and optional colour palettes you can buy once if you want a different look. None of it is required to play the daily puzzle.
No. Progress, statistics and settings are saved in your own browser. Signing in exists only so a purchase follows you to another device — see our Privacy Policy for exactly what that stores.
Because it scored below 40% against everything on the board. Topical association is not the same as similarity of meaning — two words can obviously belong to the same subject and still score low. Check the percentage on the dotted line to see how close you were.
Yes. The archive lists previous days and any puzzle can be opened by its link. Subscribers get the full archive; everyone can revisit puzzles they have already solved, and today's puzzle is always available.
Yes. Mobile and desktop browsers get the same puzzle and the same rules, and the game can be installed to your home screen as a web app.
Puzzles are generated automatically from a curated English word list and a language model that measures how close two words are in meaning. The About page explains the process in detail.
Play today's puzzle →