Word Bomb

Word Bomb

Word Bomb is an elimination word game in which players must submit valid dictionary words containing an assigned prompt string before a countdown timer expires.

Starting a Game

A game is created with /wordbomb, which takes several configuration options directly as command parameters:

Bomb speed

Slow, Standard, Fast, or Rapid, controlling the starting timer and how quickly it decreases

Starting difficulty

an optional starting point among the difficulty buckets described below (ignored if Rapid speed is selected)

Prompt length

a minimum and maximum length between 2 and 4 letters (2 to 3 by default)

Special characters

whether apostrophes, hyphens, both, or neither are allowed in submitted words (both by default)

Category

an optional filter restricting prompts to a themed word list (any category by default)

Running the command posts a lobby showing the chosen settings, with the footer "Press Join to participate. Press Start when ready. Max 16 players." The host can invite specific players from a dropdown, and other players can join the lobby directly; the host then starts or cancels the game.

Before a game actually starts, the chosen settings are checked for viability: if the combination of category, prompt length, and special-character rules would leave fewer than 300 possible prompts to draw from, the game refuses to start and asks the host to adjust the settings instead. Once a valid game is confirmed, it doesn't begin immediately — the bot posts "Word Bomb is starting in 25 seconds! Join in now!" and waits out that window before the first prompt is actually assigned.

If the host starts a game without anyone else joining, it becomes a solo match: "🎮 Game is starting! YOU have 🧡🧡🧡 3 lives. Use words containing the prompt or lose a life. ⚠️ You are doing a solo game against yourself! ✨ Whatever happens here won't influence your statistics. ✨" In a multiplayer game, the start message instead reads: "🎮 Game is starting! Each player has 🧡🧡🧡 3 lives. Use words containing the prompt or lose a life."

Rules

1. Each player starts with 3 lives.
2. On a player's turn, the bot assigns a prompt, a short letter sequence, and the player must submit a word from the dictionary that contains that sequence, has not already been used by any player in the game, and matches the game's special-character settings.
3. Invalid submissions, words that do not contain the prompt, are not in the dictionary, or have already been used, are rejected and do not cost a life; the player may keep trying until time runs out.
4. If time runs out before a valid word is submitted, the player loses a life.
5. A player who loses all 3 lives is eliminated.
6. The last remaining player wins the game.

Words are lowercased and spaces are converted to hyphens before checking, so "word bomb" is evaluated as "word-bomb".

Timer

Each bomb speed has its own starting time and minimum time:

Speed	Starting Time	Minimum Time
Slow	12 seconds	4 seconds
Standard	8 seconds	3.5 seconds
Fast	6 seconds	3 seconds
Rapid	3 seconds	3 seconds (does not decrease)

For speeds other than Rapid, the timer holds steady for the first 10 turns, then decreases by 0.1 seconds every other turn through turn 30, then by 0.1 seconds every turn after that, down to the speed's minimum. Each time the timer would decrease, there is also a 12% chance that it instead increases by 0.5 or 1.5 seconds, up to the speed's starting time.

Difficulty and Prompts

When a game is not set to Rapid speed, prompts are drawn from sixteen named difficulty buckets, based on how many dictionary words contain that prompt. A host may choose a specific starting bucket, or let the bot begin at the most common end and work toward rarer prompts as the game continues. Rapid speed draws from very short prompts, one or two letters long, rather than using the difficulty buckets.

Bucket	Dictionary Matches
Tranquil	120,000+
Gentle	100,000–119,999
Steady	80,000–99,999
Unruly	60,000–79,999
Fierce	40,000–59,999
Ruthless	20,000–39,999
Brutal	12,000–19,999
Twisted	8,000–11,999
Aberrant	4,000–7,999
Chaos	2,000–3,999
Nightmare	900–1,999
Unreal	300–899
Void	100–299
Oblivion	10–99
Suicide	2–9
Singularity	exactly 1

The available category filters, which restrict prompts to a themed word list instead of the full dictionary, are: Blacklist, Cosmos, Geology, Languages, Mathology, Ideologies Religions & Cults, Songs & Albums, Creatures, Plants, Colorology, Food & Drinks, Phobias, Pokedex, Toponyms, Ologies, Numbers, Palindromes, Longs, and Smolz.

Turn Display

Each turn, the bot posts a message showing whose turn it is, the assigned prompt in bold, the time remaining, the player's remaining lives, how many dictionary words actually solve the current prompt, and who's up next. The solve count lets players judge how many valid answers likely remain for that prompt — a bucket like Singularity, by definition, only ever has exactly one.

Ending a Game

When a player is eliminated, the bot posts "☠️ {player} has been eliminated! 💀" and removes them from the turn order. When the game ends, a leaderboard and match statistics are posted, and the game's private thread is cleaned up automatically shortly afterward.

Statistics

Multiplayer results are recorded per player and contribute to the following tracked stats: games played, wins, win rate, turns played, average word length, and total characters used. These can be viewed with /wordbomb_stats and compared on the server leaderboard with /wordbomb_leaderboard. Solo games do not affect statistics.

History

From "Zalgo" to Singularity

The current split between the Suicide bucket (prompts with 2–9 matching words) and the Singularity bucket (prompts with exactly 1 match) replaces an older, considerably stranger system. Previously, "Suicide" covered every prompt from 1 to 9 matches as a single tier, and a separate rare special event — internally called "zalgo" — could spawn instead. Rather than drawing from a real prompt, zalgo used to synthesize a completely fabricated prompt with zero matching words at all ("sub0"), invented on the fly whenever nothing better was available. Its odds of appearing were a hidden 1-in-1,000 per turn, quietly boostable to 1-in-20 through an undocumented toggle on /wordbomb that showed up in the lobby only as an unexplained "Start ??? requested" line, with no public explanation of what it did.

Because zero-match prompts are being phased out of the dictionary community-wide, manufacturing fake ones on the fly was retired entirely, along with the hidden toggle and its 1-in-1,000/1-in-20 odds. "Zalgo" was renamed Singularity and turned into a real, ordinary bucket — reachable through normal turn progression like any other tier, or chosen directly as a starting difficulty — built from genuine one-match prompts instead of invented ones.

The Hyphens Setting Used to Do Nothing

For an unknown period, choosing to allow hyphens in a game's special-character settings had no actual effect: the shared prompt-frequency calculation always stripped out any prompt containing a hyphen before a game ever saw it, regardless of what the host had selected. A hyphen-permitting game now recomputes its own prompt frequencies with hyphens included, rather than reusing the shared, hyphen-excluded calculation every other setting combination draws from.

Other Fixes

• Selecting a category filter used to trigger a synchronous, roughly 20-second recomputation over the entire dictionary even when the category name didn't actually correspond to a real filter — the check for whether recomputation was even necessary was backwards. Both the lobby's settings-validation step and the real game start were also found constructing the game object directly on the shared event loop, meaning that ~20 second recompute (whenever it did legitimately need to happen) could stall every other concurrent game across the bot; both are now run on a background thread instead.
• After a bot restart, every restored Word Bomb game's cleanup logic was accidentally wired to remove the same (most recently restored) game's registry entry, rather than each game removing its own — leaking every other restored game's entry indefinitely. Fixed.
• Win/loss statistics used to be loaded once when a game started and saved once when it ended, sometimes over an hour apart; any other Word Bomb game (or Anagram game, which records some of its own title-tracking data into the same statistics file) that finished in between had its results silently overwritten by that stale snapshot when the first game finally saved. Statistics are now loaded fresh immediately before saving, rather than held from game start.
• A legacy, entirely unreachable copy of the game's core class, along with a helper function with zero remaining callers anywhere in the codebase, were removed as dead code.
• A duplicate copy of the difficulty-bucket emoji table was missing the "zalgo" entry (predating its rename to Singularity), causing that bucket's emoji to silently render as nothing wherever it appeared; the duplicate copy has since been consolidated into one.

See also

• Super-Shiritori
• Anagram
• Dictionary Information
• Achievements