Vowl
How to play
Vowl is a two-player word race. You and your opponent get the same hidden word at the same moment, each on your own phone, and you both start guessing. Nobody takes turns - you play at whatever speed you can think.
Starting a game
Type a name and pick a word length: four, five, or six letters. Choose a friend and you get a five-character invite code and a link to send them; when they open it, the game begins as soon as you are both ready. Choose Birdie the bot and you play the house instead, at Easy, Fair, or Ruthless. Nothing to install and no account to make - the link is the whole invitation.
Guessing
You get six guesses. Every guess has to be a real word of the right length: Vowl accepts the ENABLE dictionary, the same list Scrabble players use - minus the words you would not want on a classroom wall - which leaves 3,862 four-letter words, 8,572 five-letter words, and 15,163 six-letter words. A rejected word costs you nothing but the seconds you spent typing it.
Each letter comes back in one of three colours:
- Green right letter, right position.
- Yellow the word contains this letter, somewhere else.
- Grey the word does not contain this letter at all.
Repeated letters behave the way you would hope. If the answer holds one E and you guess two, only one of yours lights up - greens are handed out first, then yellows, one per unclaimed copy. Guessing GEESE against ERASE will not paint three yellows for three E's.
What you see of your opponent
A lane beside your board fills in one bar per guess they spend. That is deliberately all you get: a count, never their letters and never their colours. You can tell they are three deep and closing, which is exactly as much pressure as the game wants, and you can never reverse engineer their board into a hint about yours.
Winning a round
Fewest guesses wins. Solve on three against their four and the round is yours, however long each of you took to type. If only one of you solves it at all, that player takes the round. If neither of you finds it in six, the round is a dead heat.
The round can also end before both boards are full. Once someone has solved on guess N and the other player has spent N guesses without solving, the best they can still do is lose, so Vowl calls it there rather than making them play out guesses that cannot change anything.
Sudden death
A dead heat does not end the duel - it escalates. Both players ready up, a new word comes out, and the rules change: in sudden death the first player to solve wins, immediately. Guess counts stop mattering. The moment either board hits the answer the round is over and the other board freezes wherever it stood, mid-word if that is where it was. If neither of you solves it in six, you go again with another word, and you keep going until somebody gets there first.
The scoreboard
Every invite code is its own little arena with its own running record - duels won, by name, for as long as you keep playing in that room. Start a fresh game whenever you want a clean slate.