Vowl
About
Vowl is a two player word race. Same hidden word, two phones, fewest guesses wins. It exists because playing Wordle next to someone and comparing scores afterwards is not the same thing as racing them.
The idea
Wordle is asynchronous by design. Everyone gets the same word, you do it whenever, and the social part is a grid of squares in a group chat afterwards. That works, and it is also the part of the game with the least tension in it.
Vowl moves the comparison into the round. You both get the word at the same moment, and the lane beside your grid fills up as your opponent spends guesses, so you can feel them getting close without learning anything about the answer. Guessing under that pressure is a different experience from guessing alone, which is the whole reason this exists.
How it is built
One small Node process. The server owns every rule, holds the answer, validates guesses and computes the colours, and the client renders what it is told. Nothing about the word ever reaches the browser before the round is over, which is what stops the obvious cheat of reading it out of the page.
There is no account system and no login. Creating a game mints a five character code and a link, and the link is the entire invitation. Rooms are unlisted, codes are random, and an empty room is deleted after thirty minutes.
The wire protocol is documented, so a native client can be written against the same backend without reverse engineering anything.
The dictionary
Every legal ENABLE word of the chosen length can be guessed and can be the answer. That is 3,903 four letter words, 8,636 five letter words and 15,232 six letter words. There is no separate curated answer list. Details and reasoning are on the dictionary page.
Ads
There are ads on the written pages in the strategy section and on the recap screen after a round finishes. There are none during a round and there are none on the home screen, because an ad that sits near the keyboard while you are trying to think is a worse product and gets misclicked.
Contact
Bugs, a word the dictionary should not have accepted, or anything else: contact@playvowl.com. Privacy details are on the privacy page and the terms are here.