About

Verbraid is a small independent site with two daily word games on it. Both are free, neither asks you to make an account, and both run entirely inside your browser — once a page has loaded it makes no further network requests at all.

The two games

Verbraid hides four five-letter words in a chain, where the last letter of each word is the first letter of the next. Each guess is judged twice: once on spelling, with the familiar green and yellow tiles, and once on meaning, as a heat reading. The two are independent clues and you generally need both. All four boards draw from a single pool of nine guesses, so deciding where to spend a guess matters as much as what to guess.

Weave shows sixteen words hiding four groups of four. What makes it different from other grouping games is that a wrong answer still tells you something: every miss is scored on how closely related your four words actually were, so a near miss reads differently from a wild stab.

Where the puzzles come from

Neither game has a server, and neither calls out to a language model. The sense that two words are related comes from a hand-authored ontology — a map of about a hundred categories covering roughly eight hundred common five-letter words, built up by hand and checked by a linter.

Each word is filed under the categories it genuinely belongs to. Tagging zebra as a mammal also places it under animals and under nature, so two words grow gradually less related as they diverge higher up that tree. zebra and horse share a great deal; zebra and eagle share less; zebra and table share nothing at all.

A pure hierarchy was not enough on its own. It scored piano against music at zero, because one is an object and the other an art form, and it left most guesses reading as completely unrelated, which tells a player nothing. So the model also carries associative categories — musical, nautical, culinary, clinical — that cut across the hierarchy and group words by the situation they belong to rather than by what they are.

That same ontology does three jobs. It produces Verbraid's heat readings, it supplies the category clue shown on each board, and it generates Weave's grids. The third one is why Weave can exist at all: a grouping puzzle normally needs a human editor every single day, and a model of meaning is a generator.

How the games are built

Both are static pages: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript modules, no framework, no build step, no dependencies. That is partly taste and partly consequence — a game with no backend cannot lose your progress to an outage, cannot leak an account you never created, and will still work in ten years.

It also sets a hard limit that shaped the design. Because the puzzle seed is public and everything ships to your browser, the day's answers are technically derivable from the code. Nothing here is treated as a secret, and the games are built on the assumption that you would rather solve a puzzle than inspect one.

Accessibility

Colour is never the only way information is conveyed. In Verbraid every guess row carries a plain-language sentence for screen readers, and each key is labelled with its current state. In Weave every group announces its category and its words, and each group's difficulty is stated in words as well as in colour. Both games offer a high-contrast palette that stays readable with the common forms of colour blindness, both are fully playable from the keyboard, and animations respect your reduced-motion setting.

Automated checks cannot certify accessibility conformance, and I make no claim that these pages are fully compliant. If something is unusable for you, I would genuinely like to hear about it — that kind of report is the only way these things get found.

Who makes this

One person, as a side project, for the pleasure of building it. There is no company behind the site and no team. Puzzles are generated rather than hand-written, but the ontology they draw on is written and maintained by hand, and it gets corrected whenever a player points out a category that does not fit. Several already have.

If you have found a bug, an unfair puzzle, or a word that should have counted, the contact page explains where to send it. How your data is handled is set out in the privacy policy — the short version is that your progress is stored in your own browser and never sent anywhere.