Hot & Cold (hotandcold.app)

About Hot & Cold (hotandcold.app)

Hot & Cold at hotandcold.app is a word game about closeness of meaning. There is a secret word, and you can type any everyday noun as a guess. The game answers with the guess's rank: the whole list of about 15,000 words is sorted by how similar each one is to the secret, so rank 1 is the answer and a rank of 40 means only 39 words are closer.

The rank also comes as a heat band. Freezing covers most of the list, then cold, cool, warm, hot for roughly the top 24, and blazing for ranks 2 to 6, just short of the answer. The ranks are precomputed, so two players who guess the same word see the same number. Only words that can be nouns are accepted, plurals count as their singular, and the secret is always one of the more common words on the list.

The Daily gives every player the same secret, chosen on the server at midnight UTC. A round is scored out of 1,000: the first four guesses are free and later ones cost a little more each, and the Help button sells clue words from near the secret or letter reveals for points. A daily streak and a global leaderboard track how you do, and past puzzles can be played from the archive.

Beyond the daily there is Endless practice with a random secret each round, a challenge against a bot, and rooms where friends hunt the same secret in rounds or as a team. The game runs in the browser and as an app for iPhone and Android, where the word list is bundled for offline play.

This is a different game from the older Hot and Cold at hotandcoldgame.com.

How to play Hot & Cold (hotandcold.app)

1. Open hotandcold.app/play and choose the Daily.
2. Type any everyday noun and submit it.
3. Read its rank and heat: a lower rank and a warmer band mean the guess is closer in meaning.
4. Follow the words that run warm and drop the ideas that come back freezing.
5. Use Help for clue words or letters if you are stuck, and find the secret word at rank 1.

Screenshots

Tips

• Open with broad words such as animal, food or place to find which area of meaning the secret is in.
• The first four guesses cost nothing, so spread them across very different ideas.
• Once a guess is hot, try its close relatives and members of the same category rather than synonyms of the whole idea.
• Hints cost less when your best guess is already close, so try a few more guesses before buying one.

Questions