anoun
Daily noun deduction game. Wrong guesses reveal something they have in common with the hidden word. You're playing the official anoun.online word on Itch. A different word can be played over at r/anoun on Reddit every day.
How to play
- 🔍 Try to guess the hidden word (a noun).
- 🔗 Wrong guesses reveal traits they share with the hidden word.
- 🧩 Use the traits to deduce the hidden word.
- 🎯 You have 20 guesses to get it right.
- 🕒 The word renews at midnight in your timezone.
Useful tips
- 👆 Double tap or double click a clue to see the guessed word.
- 💭 Tap or click and drag to move clues around and organize your thoughts.
- 👀 Pinch to zoom on touch devices; hold Ctrl and scroll or pinch a trackpad to zoom on desktop. Drag empty space to pan.
- 🌱 If you get stuck in one line of thought, try diversifying your guesses to get varied clues.
FAQ
How are the words chosen?
The creator of the game (hey, that's me) manually curates words based on patterns that seem to work well. Generally that means concrete nouns - things. They may be previous players' guesses or just things I think are neat.
Think everyday things or things most people know about. Esoteric words like "gnomon" or "ferrule" are not used. Abstract nouns like "childhood" or "knowledge" are also avoided.
Will leaving reset my progress?
The session is saved on your current device, so you can return and keep going later. However, you must complete it before midnight in your timezone (when the word renews).
What are the clues exactly?
They are commonalities (shared traits) between your guess and the hidden word. The game is essentially saying: nope, your guess "shark" was incorrect, but the thing you're looking for also lives in the ocean.
The idea is that given a few of these shared traits, you might be able to deduce today's word.
Why is clue generation slow?
anoun is LLM-enabled and your clue is generated on the fly. To ensure accurate and meaningful clues, the model must reason for a bit.
It's a trade-off between speed and quality. Despite this, it's not flawless.
So why is it sometimes really fast?!
Sometimes reasoning takes less time. It's easier to find a commonality between "shark" and "dolphin" than "cupcake" and "ghost".
Furthermore, previous clues are cached. So if your guess is the same as someone else's for that word, you might get the same clue. In such cases, you'll see the clue almost instantly.
Ugh, a clue I was given made no sense!
Yeah, unfortunately it happens sometimes. Sorry about that. Despite hundreds of iterations to what now looks like the ultimate instruction, the LLM sometimes fails to follow it. But the instruction keeps getting refined, and LLMs keep evolving.
Expect clue quality to improve over time. In the meantime, please downvote bad clues in your guess log after playing.
What happens when I downvote a clue?
If enough players agree that a clue is nonsensical or otherwise bad, the system will avoid giving it to future players. The threshold for "enough players" may vary.
Downvoted clues are also manually reviewed as part of LLM instruction refinement.
Credits
- 💖 Special thanks to good friends who helped shape the game: Linnea, Hanna, Emil, Amina, Bobbe, and Lukas.
- 🧑💻 (c) 2025 Koffeinoverdos. All rights reserved.
⚠️SPOILERS MAY APPEAR IN THE COMMENT SECTION. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. ⚠️
Comments
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Definitely noticed the same thing GoodGuyGames did--part of the problem inherent in a guessing game that involves zeroing in on an answer is that your guesses start to get pretty similar ("necklace", "bracelet"...) and so the commonalities it finds are also pretty similar, which means you're not getting more information.
And while everything it gave me was associated with the answer, it wasn't always particularly associated with things I typed in. ("nosering": "Often polished"? Is it? "bread": "Frequently gifted"? I can't remember the last time someone offered me a gift-wrapped baguette.)
And GGG isn't wrong that it being an AI game makes it less appealing: not because I hate AI (which I do), but because it means that no thought has gone into any given day's game, because an AI cannot think. You clearly put thought into making the game, and kudos for that, but at the point at which an AI takes over, there's no guarantee any more that there will be a good path from the starting point to the solution, which is the kind of thoughtfulness that a game or puzzle designer will put into a round or level.
I might give it another go tomorrow, to see whether it exceeds my expectations. But I have to admit I'm not optimistic.
Its fun, innovative, polished and easy to pick up. But being an AI game makes it less appealing, at least for me. And there are some minor annoying things like when given two similar traits (like "associated with animals" and "animal-related"). Only if it was somehow more human-made...
Hey there! What did you think of anoun? Feedback is greatly appreciated!