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Word Horde
Drolleries climb off a medieval page's margins to eat its six lines of Old English; type the word on each one's scroll to scrape it off.
What it is
type them off the page
A typing game on a manuscript page at night. Hares with swords, snails, an ape holding its scroll upside down, a worm that tunnels under the vellum, a preaching fox and its geese, and a head on legs that spits ink walk in from the margins toward the text in the middle, each carrying a word on a scroll; type the word and the creature is scraped off, leaving a faint ghost behind. The six lines of Old English are your lives. A night is twelve hours, with a boss at IV, VIII and XII; survive to dawn and the next night is faster, on a new text: Riddle 47 from the Exeter Book, then Beowulf, then The Wanderer. Three hands set the pace: novice, scribe and master, labelled 25, 45 and 70 words a minute. Menus are scrolls too, chosen by typing their word. Every wyvern you cut down to its name adds its kenning to your word-hoard, in a fixed order on an ordinary night, sixteen in all; with the nine creatures you scrape off and the three texts you see through to dawn it holds 28 entries, and once it holds anything, typing hoard on the title opens it, blanks and all. Tonight's leaf, typed vigil on the title once you have played, is one night a day made from the date: one of the three texts with the day's kenning on the wyvern. Everyone who writes it in the same hand meets the same creatures in the same order (a master's leaf brings more creatures than a novice's, with longer words), and it ends at dawn.
How to play
Controls, then the numbers that matter
A wrong key turns red and breaks your mark, but it never costs the letters you have already written, so there is nothing to delete. Backspace only lifts the pen off a word you started. Space and hyphens are never held against you.
Clean words in a row raise the mark: at 5, 12, 20 and 30 the score multiplies by 2, 3, 4 and 5. A word pays 10 a letter times the mark, a wyvern's body segment half again, a boss's word two and a half times; a stained line breaks the mark as surely as a slip.
A creature that reaches the text eats the line nearest it. An ink blot stains a line, and a second blot on the same line eats it; a blot carries one letter, and typing it wipes the blot even halfway through another word, without losing your place, unless that letter also carries on a word you could be writing.
Get through an hour without losing a line and an eaten line is recopied onto a patch (or, with none eaten, a stained one is cleaned), and the hour's bonus triples from 50 to 150 times the hour times the night.
Hour IV is a wyvern: cut its body away and its head unrolls a kenning. Hour VIII is a fox in a pulpit: finish each verse before he moves on, or the congregation grows. Hour XII is the moth, carrying a line of the riddle word by word; each of its words you write drives it back. Each one down pays 1,000 times the night.
Each night after the first has creatures 10 percent faster and 12 percent more of them, words a letter longer on the second night and two on the third and after, and up to two more on the page at once.
No two creatures on the page start with the same letter if the game can help it, so your first key picks the target. The ape holds its scroll upside down: type the word the right way up. The worm can only be written while it is above the vellum.
Type keep on the dawn or lost panel and the page is saved as a picture, every ghost on it, signed at the foot with how the night ended. It wants a keyboard: on a phone, hold it sideways and tap the page for the on-screen keyboard. The page is a fixed 16:9 leaf, so a phone held upright gets a note asking you to turn it, and a run in play pauses.
A blank in the word-hoard still says what its kenning means, and on an ordinary night the next wyvern carries the first blank, so each wyvern you cut down to its name there brings a new one until all sixteen are in.
A new leaf comes at midnight, Taipei time (16:00 UTC). Your best in each hand that day is kept, with how many leaves you have written and the most days in a row; a missed day takes nothing away. Type copy on its end panel for one plain line of how the night went, hand included.
A lost page says how far you were from your best in that hand, and what is nearest to reach next: a kenning for your word-hoard, or the full mark at 30 clean words.
Trophies
15 trophies
Sign in and the ones you earn light up here and on your account.
The night
- Saw the page through to dawn
- Cut the wyvern down to its name
- Wrote the fox's sermon to its end
- Thirty clean words: the full mark
- Saw dawn with not a line eaten
- Saw dawn in the master's hand
The word-hoard
- Eight kennings in the word-hoard
- All sixteen kennings in the word-hoard
- Every margin creature scraped off
- Saw Beowulf's leaf through to dawn
- Saw The Wanderer's leaf through to dawn
- The whole word-hoard: 28 of 28
Tonight's leaf
- Wrote tonight's leaf
- Saw tonight's leaf through to dawn
- Seven leaves written, on seven days
What players say
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From the changelog
What changed
StuStudios 2.2
- Type vigil on Word Horde’s title for tonight’s leaf, one night a day on one of the three texts, and every wyvern you cut down to its name adds its kenning to your word-hoard, until all sixteen are in.
Word Horde went up on the arcade
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