Word Horde

A typing game on a manuscript page, from dusk to dawn.

How to write

Every creature carries a word on a scroll. Type it and the creature is scraped off the page. Letters you get right turn blue. A wrong key is marked in red and breaks your mark, but it never costs you the letters you have already written, so there is nothing to delete. Just carry on.

No two creatures on the page start with the same letter if the game can help it, so your first key picks the creature. Backspace lifts the pen off a word you started. Esc pauses. Enter skips an hour's card. Space and hyphens are never held against you.

What it costs

The text in the middle is six lines long, and those lines are your lives. A creature that reaches the text eats the line nearest to it. An ink blot stains a line, and a second blot on the same line eats it. Lose all six and the page is lost. Get through an hour without losing a line and one is recopied onto a patch.

Clean words raise your mark. At five, twelve, twenty and thirty words in a row the score multiplies, up to five times. One slip starts it again.

Who comes out of the margin

The hare

Fast, short words, and it has a sword.

The snail

The slowest thing on the page, carrying the longest word.

The ape

Holds its scroll upside down. Type the word the right way up.

The worm

Goes under the vellum and moves fastest there. You can only write it while it is above.

The fox and its geese

While the fox preaches, its geese keep their scrolls rolled up. Erase the fox and they run at the page.

The grotesque

A head on legs. It stops and spits ink. Type a blot's letter to wipe it, even halfway through another word, and you keep your place.

Hours IV, VIII and XII

A wyvern whose body you cut away before its head will show its name; a fox in a pulpit whose sermon moves on if you are slow; and the moth.

The page you are defending

The first night's text is Riddle 47 from the Exeter Book, copied in England around 970:

Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte wrætlicu wyrd…

A moth ate words. To me that seemed a wondrous fate… the thieving guest was no whit the wiser for the words he swallowed.

Later nights bring the opening of Beowulf and of The Wanderer. The small lines above each line of Old English are glosses, the way a later reader would have written them in. They are new translations, made for this page.

The wyvern's head carries a kenning, the Old English habit of naming a thing by two others: whale-road for the sea, bone-house for the body, hoard-ward for a dragon. The game's name is one too. A word-hoard is everything a poet knows how to say.

So you keep one. Every wyvern you cut down to its name gives up its kenning to your word-hoard. On an ordinary night the sixteen kennings come in a fixed order, so each wyvern brings one you have not had; tonight's leaf's wyvern carries the day's. The nine creatures you scrape off the margin and the three texts you see through to dawn go in beside them: twenty-eight entries. Once you have one, type hoard on the title to read it; a blank still says what its kenning means.

Tonight's leaf

After your first night, type vigil on the title. Tonight's leaf 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, hour by hour, and close to nine words in ten the same: a word can change when what is already on your page would share its first letter. The hands keep their own pace, as on any night, so a master's leaf brings more creatures than a novice's, with longer words. It ends at dawn, and a new leaf comes at midnight, Taipei time. Your best in each hand is kept for the day, with how many leaves you have written and the most days in a row; a day missed takes nothing away. Type copy on its end panel for one plain line of how the night went.

Why it looks like this

Medieval scribes drew in the margins of the books they copied: rabbits with swords, snails fighting knights, foxes preaching to geese. These are those creatures and this is that page, in iron-gall ink with three pigments and nothing that glows. Every creature you erase is scraped off the vellum and leaves a faint ghost behind, the way scraped-off writing survives on a palimpsest. By dawn the margins are a record of your night. When a night ends, type keep and the page is saved as a picture, signed at the foot the way a scribe signed a finished book.

Are the speeds honest?

Each difficulty is tuned against a simulated scribe that plays the real game: it types at a steady speed, takes half a second to read each new word, slips on one key in twenty, and always works on whatever is closest to the text. Over twenty nights at each setting:

That is the first night with hoard-ward on the wyvern, as a new player meets it. Your word-hoard changes the kenning, so each hand was also run at its labelled speed with each of the sixteen in turn, 320 nights a hand: the simulated scribe saw dawn in 215 of them as a novice, 210 as a scribe and 134 as a master. On 200 days of tonight's leaf it saw dawn on 145, 122 and 81 of them.

A person reads ahead while typing, which helps, and panics, which doesn't, so take the labels as a place to start. The script that made these numbers is verify-difficulty.mjs, in the game's source folder.

Word-hoard

On an ordinary night the kennings come in a fixed order, one with each wyvern you cut down to its name, and tonight's leaf's wyvern carries the day's; the creatures go in as you scrape them off, and a text when you see it through to dawn. The game never takes an entry out.