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Category: Word · Players: free-for-all (no elimination) · Status: Stable
The host picks a secret word. Chat guesses words, and each guess is scored by how semantically close it is to the secret — rank 1 is the word itself, higher ranks are further away. The first person to land rank 1 wins.
The Chatexto game screen: a closest-guess hero, a live ladder of ranked guesses, and a points leaderboard

Chatexto running live on stream

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Gameplay

1

Guess words

Type a single word (letters only, at least two characters). Each new word is placed on a closeness ladder by its rank; the closer it is, the hotter it glows.
2

Read the heat

A low rank (e.g. #3) means you’re very close; a high rank (e.g. #1340) is cold. Use everyone’s guesses to triangulate toward the secret.
3

Solve it

The first person to type the exact secret word (rank 1) wins and ends the round. The host can also reveal early to settle on points.
Each unique word is scored once — the first person to play it claims it, and inflections (plurals, tenses) resolve to their base word. Late joiners are welcome any time; their first guess opts them in.

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How closeness works

Chatexto ranks every word in its dictionary by how close it is in meaning to the secret word, then tells you where your guess landed. Rank 1 is the secret itself; rank 500 is the 500th-closest word.
A meaning-space diagram: the secret word at the center, ringed by close, mid, and far words

Every word ranked by meaning — closer words sit nearer the secret and glow hotter

  • Meaning, not spelling. Words are compared using word embeddings — each word is a point in a high-dimensional “meaning space” learned from how words are used together. “King” sits near “queen” and “throne,” far from “banana.” So sunrise scores well for a secret of dawn even though they share no letters.
  • Your rank is a position. The game sorts the entire dictionary by closeness to the secret and reads off where your word falls. A low rank means you’re closing in; a high rank means you’re cold.
  • Heat. The board groups guesses into close / mid / far bands so the room can see how warm the field is at a glance. Milestone ranks are worth chasing: the top 100, the top 10, the top 3, and the solve at rank 1.
  • Word forms don’t matter. Plurals and tenses fold to their base word (movies → movie, tried → try, racing → race), so you’re never penalized for how you typed it.
  • One claim per word. The first person to play a word claims its rank; repeats — or a different form of the same word — don’t score again. Reading the top guess off the screen and retyping it won’t put you on the board.
  • Off-dictionary guesses. A word the game doesn’t know simply doesn’t rank (it shows as “not a word”). The host’s secret is checked when the round is created, so it’s always a word the game can rank.
Under the hood, each word is a 300-dimension vector, and closeness is cosine similarity after an All-but-the-Top correction (Mu & Viswanath, 2018) that strips the few dominant directions shared by every word — so ranks reflect real differences in meaning rather than how common a word is.

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Configuration

Theme. Chatexto draws the secret from a curated word category, so guesses stay on-topic. Leave it on Random to let the game pick a theme (and word) for you, or choose Custom and set your own word below. Secret word. Optional — type any in-vocabulary English word to override the theme and play that exact word. It’s checked when the round is created; an unknown word is rejected so you can pick another. Leave it blank to use the theme. Winner mode. Decides how a round is scored and who’s crowned:
  • most_points (default) — every accepted guess scores by rank tier (see Scoring below). A rank-1 guess still ends the round and banks 100 for the solver, but the highest total takes the crown, so a prolific guesser can edge out the solver. The host can also reveal early to settle on points before anyone solves it.
  • final_guess — the first person to type the exact word wins outright and the round ends immediately.
Reveal gift. An optional, cooperative hint gift — prefilled with Galaxy, or clear it to turn hints off. When set, sends of that gift uncover letters for the whole room; see Gifts for the amounts and caps.

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Layout

Labeled layout of the Chatexto play surface

Chatexto — play surface

  1. Marquee — game title and how-to hint.
  2. Heat tiles — counts of close / mid / far guesses so far.
  3. Gift strip — which gift reveals letters and by how much (when configured).
  4. Revealed letters — letters unlocked by gifts, listed without positions.
  5. Closest-guess hero — the current best guess, with its rank and heat bar.
  6. Closest-guess ladder — recent guesses sorted by rank, colored by heat.
  7. Recent attempts — every guess in arrival order, including duplicates and non-words.
  8. Leaderboard — top players by points (or best rank in final-guess mode).

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Gifts

Chatexto’s gift is a cooperative hint — it helps the whole room and can never hand anyone the win. It’s set by the Reveal gift option (Galaxy by default; clear it to turn hints off).
Letter tiles filling in as gifts are sent, stopping at a 70% cap with the rest locked

Each gift reveals ~10% of the letters at random, up to a 70% cap

  • Each send reveals about 10% of the letters (always at least one), at random positions — so a hint suggests the word’s shape without spelling it out from the front.
  • Every send is equal. One send reveals the same ~10% no matter which gift you pick or how many diamonds it’s worth. Progress comes from how often the gift is sent, not how expensive it is — there’s no paying for the answer.
  • Reveals stop at 70%. At least ~30% of the letters can never be bought and must be guessed. Once the cap is reached, further sends do nothing and the board shows “hints exhausted,” so a round always ends on a guess.
  • Spaces, hyphens, and punctuation are shown from the start and don’t count toward the cap.
Because reveals are flat-rate and capped, gifts move the whole room toward the answer together without letting one gifter buy the solve.

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Scoring

A hot-to-cold scale mapping rank bands to points, from 100 at rank 1 down to 0 beyond rank 5000

Lower rank = hotter = more points; a rank-1 solve banks 100

In most_points mode, each accepted guess scores by rank:
  • A rank-1 guess ends the round in either mode. In most_points, the solver banks 100 first, then the highest total is crowned — usually the solver, but a prolific guesser can edge ahead.
  • Tiebreaks: points, then best rank, then join order.
  • Wins are tracked per streamer.