🤔 Everyone passed for a full round. Feeling stuck? (Only visible to the host)
Enter the First Word
-
Chaining alone won't cut it.
Overlap the letters and make it resonate.
The link may be outdated, or the room may have already ended.
Please go back to the home screen and try again.
You can challenge the final answer too. If it's retracted, the game will resume.
📞 We recommend playing with a voice or video call going! Chatting while you play makes it even more fun.
You'll get a notification sound when it's your turn (some devices, like Android, also vibrate — iPhones can't vibrate for this due to platform limitations).
And of course, playing face to face is highly, highly, highly recommended too! Just keep it friendly enough that nobody starts a fight.
👥 Each room supports 2 to 6 players. There's also a spectator mode for watching without playing, which you can pick anytime regardless of the room's status (spectators can't join the match, but can still chat and send 🥰 reactions — and can join the match later too).
Nicknames can be up to 6 characters. If two people in the same room use the same name, a number like "②" or "③" is automatically added to tell them apart.
📝 In short: it's like a word chain game, but however many letters overlap with the previous word becomes your score! If you want the finer details, jump to whichever topic you're curious about in the table of contents below.
1. Basic Rules (Overlapping Letters = Score)
Your score is the number of letters that overlap between the end of the previous word and the start of your word!
💡 Example: "cat" ➜ "atom"
The 2 letters "at" match, so you score 2 points!
2. No Reusing Part of the Previous Word
An answer that's just the matching tail of the previous word cut out on its own (e.g. previous word "clock" ➜ answer "ock") isn't accepted at all. It doesn't use up your turn like a pass — you just get an error message on the spot and can type a different answer in the same turn. Only an answer that adds new letters after the matching part counts for points.
3. Mine Letter Penalty
If your word happens to end in someone's "mine letter," that turn's score gets cut in half (rounded down). There are 3 modes:
① Personal Mine: Each player is randomly assigned their own letter.
② Shared Mine: Every letter set by every player becomes a mine for everyone.
③ Roulette of Fate: A new mine letter is randomly picked from the candidates each turn.
You can also choose how mine letters are shown: Visible to Everyone, Only You Can See It (you only get a record of the letter you set), or Invisible to Everyone. (Note: with Personal Mine's "Invisible to Everyone," your own letter can occasionally come back around to you — a special case.)
4. First-Move Bonus
The very first word of the game has nothing to overlap with, so it can't score an overlap match. To keep the first player from being permanently at a disadvantage, it always gets a first-move bonus of word length ÷ 2 (rounded down) instead — regardless of the Long-Word Bonus setting.
※The Long-Word Bonus uses the same "length ÷ 2" formula, but only this first-move bonus applies to the opening word — the two are never added together.
5. Pass & Challenge
If you're stuck, you can use "Pass" to skip your turn. If an answer looks fishy, you can raise a "Challenge" (with an optional one-line reason). The person who submitted it then resolves the challenge by choosing "Retract" or "Reject." No Rigid Dictionary: We trust the players. Challenge any word you think is invalid, or pass it with a wink — the arena relies on your knowledge, strategy, and sportsmanship. ※Plenty of real words aren't on Wikipedia, so we recommend not challenging a word purely because "it's not in a dictionary."
※Solo mode has no opponent, so there's no Challenge feature — instead, you can "Retract" just your most recent answer yourself, up to 3 times per game (handy for fixing an obvious mistake like a typo or misclick). Earlier answers can't be retracted, since that would break the chain.
6. End Conditions
Choose from 3 options: "Reach a Target Score," "A Set Number of Rounds," or "Unlimited (the host ends it manually)." With the target-score option, the game keeps going until the end of that round, not the instant someone reaches the target — leaving room for a comeback. The rule settings screen also shows an "estimated play time," calculated from the end condition and player count (a rough estimate based on average score and answer time per player).
7. Long-Word Bonus (1 point per 2 letters)
When "Long-Word Bonus" is ON, you get a bonus of word length ÷ 2 (rounded down) added to your score!
💡 Example: you answer with "grape" (5 letters)
5 letters ÷ 2 = 2.5 ➜ rounded down to a +2 point bonus!
🔥 Total score: 2 match points + 2 bonus points = 4 points total!
8. ⭐ Bonus Time (Fill It Together!)
When ON, a shared gauge (shown on the left of the screen) fills up based on how many letters everyone types in their answers. Once it's full, the next full round — until every player has answered once — becomes Bonus Time, and anyone who answers during it gets 1.5× their score for that turn! The gauge's cap is recalculated automatically each time from the average answer length so far, so it keeps triggering at a reasonable pace no matter who's playing or how fast. Passing during Bonus Time only costs that player their own chance (it doesn't affect anyone else).
※Solo mode has the same feature (since it's just one player, instead of "a full round," the very next answer after the gauge fills gets the 1.5× bonus).
9. Reactions 👏🥰
You can react to a fun answer in the history with 👏 (clap). Sending 🥰 (love it) to an answer you especially liked gives that player +1 point (you can't react to your own answers). Tap either one again to undo it. Reactions affect the score during the match, but any sent after the game ends (on the results screen) are just for show and don't change the score. A nice way to show some excitement even without a call going.
10. Chat 💬
A chat box is always shown at the bottom of the lobby, rules, waiting, in-game, and results screens. Normally it just shows the latest message in small text — tap it to open the full history. Use it for quick messages or a bit of banter when playing without a call (chat only reaches other people currently in the same room).
11. Sound & Vibration 🔔
You'll hear a different sound for each of these: when it's your turn, when a new chat message arrives, when your answer gets a 👏 or 🥰, and when the shared ⭐ Bonus Time starts. On supported devices, your device also vibrates when your turn comes up (with a slightly different pattern for a bonus turn). Sound effects only start playing after you've tapped something on the page at least once (mobile browsers won't allow sound before any interaction). Note that sounds won't play if your device is on silent or vibrate-only mode.
12. Screen Color Theme (Light / Dark / System) 🌓
Tapping the "🌙 Switch to Dark Mode" button on the home screen, or the small round icon in the top right of most screens, cycles through Light → Dark → Follow System. "Follow System" isn't a color you pick yourself — it just matches your device's (phone or computer) OS setting, shown with a 📱 (phone) or 💻 (computer) icon. If your OS automatically switches between light and dark by time of day, this app will follow along too when set to this mode.
The icon in the top right is a shortcut so you can switch themes from almost any screen, even if you joined a room directly from an invite link without passing through the home screen (it's hidden only on the in-game screen, where it would overlap the controls at the top. Tapping it briefly shows which mode you just switched to.)
13. 🔥 Super Resonance (Advanced Mode, Overlap Bonus)
When "Super Resonance" (advanced mode) is ON, you get one more bonus layered on top, based on your overlap length! It's separate from the Long-Word Bonus, so both add up together if you turn on both. The formula is "overlap length − 1" (never below 0), so the bonus grows by +1 for every letter beyond the 1 letter a chain always needs (a 2-letter match gives +1, 3 letters +2, 4 letters +3, and so on).
💡 Example: with a 6-letter overlap
6 − 1 = a +5 point bonus!
🔥 Total score: 6 match points + 5 Super Resonance bonus points = 11 points total! (adds up even further if Long-Word Bonus is also on)
Since a bigger overlap turns directly into a bigger score gap, this setting is aimed at confident players or groups who want their matches to have more of an edge.
14. ⚖️ Handicap Mode
In a room with "Handicap Mode" turned ON, players with a lower "average score per turn" over their last 5 games (saved on this device) get a head-start bonus added to their starting score. Think of it as bringing everyone's starting score up to close the gap with whoever has the highest average. Anyone without a record yet (e.g. the first time this device uses Handicap Mode) just starts normally with 0 bonus.
This record doesn't include solo mode results. It's automatically recorded every time a multiplayer match ends (keeping the last 5 games, with the oldest dropped once you pass 5), and it carries over even if you create a new room. A different device or browser is tracked as a separate record, and you can delete it anytime from the "⚙️ Data Settings" screen.
15. 🔖 Favorites
From the "🔖 Save as Favorite" button at the bottom of the rules screen or on the results screen, you can name your current settings and save up to 3 of them. Just like the presets (Casual, Balanced, Chaos, Random), a saved favorite can be loaded with one tap from the "🔖 Favorites" section of the rules screen.
Handicap Mode's ON/OFF state isn't included in favorites (after loading one, if Super Resonance is ON, Handicap Mode gets locked as usual, same as with the other presets). If you already have 3 saved and try to save another, you'll be asked which one to overwrite. This is saved per device (browser) and can be deleted anytime from the "⚙️ Data Settings" screen.
16. Long Sessions & Resuming After a Break ⏳
Solo Mode: Both Unlimited mode and Time Attack save automatically after every answer. Even if you close the browser or come back the next day, you can always pick up where you left off from "Resume" on the solo mode selection screen, as long as it's the same device and browser (saves never expire).
Multiplayer: As long as you know the room code, you can reconnect to the same room anytime, whether the match is still going or already over. That said, a room untouched for 24 hours or more is treated as abandoned and automatically deleted. On the other hand, any activity from anyone — an answer, a chat message, someone joining — resets that 24-hour countdown, so a long game with many rounds, even spanning multiple days, won't disappear as long as people keep playing. If nobody's likely to come back for a long while, it's better to start a fresh room than to keep an old one around.
You can individually delete only what this app has saved in this browser (on this device). This won't affect other players or anything on the server.
Okay, "how this game came to be" makes it sound way more dramatic than it actually was. Here's the honest version: I already had a Japanese-language word-chain game — an idea I'd been quietly sitting on for ages, finally made real with a lot of help from generative AI turning my rules and feature ideas into actual working code.
That Japanese version did way better than I expected. Riding that high, I got a little ambitious and thought, "why not make an English version too?" So here we are — unlike the original, this one wasn't planned in advance at all. Pure momentum.
By the time I got around to the English version, all that feature-by-feature building had already happened on the Japanese side — I just carried the whole thing over and translated it into the game you're playing now.
💭 "Word Chain" comes straight from しりとり (shiritori), the classic Japanese word-chain game this whole thing started as. And "Ultimate"? The English version turned out so ridiculously good that it just felt right. And yes, I came up with the title in the bathroom. Where else would inspiration strike?
(Fun fact: the original Japanese version is called "Shiritori Chain Resonance" — "Resonance" doesn't actually appear in this English title, but it lives on as the name of the Super Resonance bonus, more on that below.)
Rather than just counting the overlap length, my favorite part is layering the score from several angles — the Long-Word Bonus, the shared Bonus Time gauge, Super Resonance, and so on. Quietly, the most fun part of the whole project has been hunting for a balance that keeps a comeback possible for anyone while still letting real skill differences show up in the score.
The Long-Word Bonus actually hides a little bit of strategy. Playing a longer word boosts your own bonus, but since the maximum possible overlap is capped by whichever of the two words (yours or the next one) is shorter, a longer word can also hand the next player a bigger chance to overlap with you (though of course, plenty of words are hard to overlap with, so it's never a sure thing). Whether you cash in for yourself or hand the next player an opportunity is a quiet little push-and-pull.
By the way, I built Super Resonance with tough players in mind — the type who can claw back a lead through sheer skill even after falling behind. I couldn't come up with a name that felt right at first (unlike the Long-Word Bonus), so I just called it "Advanced Mode" for a while, until "Super Resonance" came to me later and I happily renamed it. I think it also fits nicely as a setting that amplifies the "Resonance" in the original Japanese title even further. The actual mechanic (the overlap bonus) hasn't changed, so calling it "Advanced Mode" still gets the point across.
The way a word's color shifts from yellow → orange → red → pink → purple based on the overlap length is another quiet detail I care about. Reaching purple takes both luck and skill, so if you see it, consider it a pretty lucky moment.
Thanks so much for playing this game. Feature-wise, I've pretty much added everything I wanted to. Future updates? Never heard of her. But I'd love it if you stuck around anyway.
(from the creator)
Push your own limits! The basic rules — overlap scoring, Long-Word Bonus, and so on — stay the same. When the ⭐ Bonus gauge fills up, your next answer scores 1.5×.