Semantle is the weirdest and hardest Wordle game so far

Wordle’s been going long enough now that there are unofficial variations based on everything from music and film, to trying to complete up to 16 separate Wordle puzzles at once, but there’s never been anything quite like Semantle before.

The idea is that you’re trying to work out a secret word, or short phrase, by guessing at other words with a similar meaning. There are no clues to start with, so you just have to guess a word at random and the game will tell you how similar it is to the answer.

Because that doesn’t leave you much to go on you get unlimited guesses, with most people likely to take dozens of goes to get it right.

How to win at Semantle

Click here for the Semantle website and when you make a guess the game will give an indication of if you’re hot or cold and a number rating for your guess’ similarity to the answer.

The number can range from 100 to -100 but according to the game’s creator doesn’t usually go much lower than -34.

A very low score can be useful though as it suggests the word you’ve guessed is completely wrong, so if it’s a verb or adjective that means the answer is more likely to be a noun.

We’ve also found it best to use simple words when trying to get in the right area, as that helps narrow things down more quickly.

The whole game seems to have been created largely to test out the technology used to determine whether two words are similar or not and while it’s pretty good there can be a lot of unhelpful answers, especially with words that have multiple meanings.

Given how hard it is, it doesn’t seem likely that Semantle is ever going to take over from Wordle in terms of popularity, but it is certainly a different way to test your vocabulary.

There are no stats or any way to share your score, which is also going to hurt the game’s mass appeal, but there is a subreddit set-up for the game and an extensive FAQ that gets into the details of how it works and why it was made.