Solo Shiritori

Solo Shiritori

Solo Shiritori is a private word-chain match played against an AI opponent in a dedicated thread.

Starting a Game

A game is created with /solo_shiritori. Only one solo game may be active per player at a time ("You already have an active solo game!"), though a solo game can run alongside an active multiplayer game. The bot creates a private thread, posts a starting word, and begins the AI at the ROOKIE personality.

The thread's rules message differs slightly in wording from multiplayer: "Allowed: Regular words, hyphenated words, acronyms, city names. Not Allowed: Personal names (unless with meaning), or words with non-letter characters."

Rules

1. Each word must start with the final letter of the previous word.
2. A word cannot repeat one already used in that session.
3. A word must be found in the dictionary and contain only letters, hyphens, or apostrophes.
4. Any invalid submission, whether a wrong starting letter, a repeat, or a word not in the dictionary, ends the game immediately; there is no retry within a turn.

Valid player words receive a ✅ reaction; invalid ones receive ❌. A message that starts with !, with any of the multiplayer AI-summon commands (such as !noob), is empty, or carries an attachment or embed instead of text is silently ignored rather than treated as a move — it neither counts as a word nor ends the game.

The AI Opponent

The AI begins as ROOKIE. Its personality can change between turns; the bot tracks the length of the player's most recent words (up to the last 30) together with the number of rounds played to decide whether and how to adjust. This AI reuses the exact same underlying word-selection logic and spawn-probability table as Multiplayer Shiritori's AI opponents (documented in full on AI Bots), a shared component rather than a separate implementation — see Ghost's Design Philosophy for how this fits into a broader analogy Ghost uses for the relationship between the bot's game modes.

A game ends in the AI's favor if the player submits an invalid word. It ends in the player's favor if the AI cannot find any valid word starting with the required letter: "AI ({personality}) couldn't find a valid word starting with '{letter}'. You win!" In an extremely rare case, roughly 1 in 27,963,028, the AI's selected word fails to actually start with the required letter; this is treated as an AI failure, ends the game, and unlocks the "Man Beats Machine" achievement the first time it happens to a player.

VOWELLESS is a specific exception to the "can't find a word" ending above. Since a word beginning with a vowel can never itself be vowel-free, VOWELLESS is unable to move on a genuinely large share of turns — by design, it is never allowed to fall back to a word containing a vowel just to keep the game going (see AI Bots for the full mechanic). Rather than ending the game every time this happens, which given how often it comes up would have made VOWELLESS nearly unplayable in Solo Shiritori, the bot instead announces that VOWELLESS "leaves" and is immediately replaced by a freshly-rolled personality (never VOWELLESS or LARP again) that takes the same turn in its place. The game only actually ends in the player's favor if that replacement personality also can't find a word — an outcome only slightly less rare than any other personality's ordinary failure.

Ending a Game

A session also ends after inactivity: if the player goes quiet, the bot posts a 30-second warning ("30 seconds left! Type a word or the game will end due to inactivity") before the 5-minute timeout actually expires, rather than the game simply vanishing without notice.

When a game ends for any reason, the bot posts a summary showing the number of turns played and the percentage of the dictionary used so far. This turn count covers the entire match — every word played by both the player and the AI, including the starting word — and is a different figure from the player-specific "rounds played" statistic tracked by /solo_stats, which only counts the player's own successful turns.

The thread is deleted a flat 3 minutes after the game ends, though the message shown to players describes it more loosely as "3-5 minutes" to leave some buffer.

History: if a game's private thread vanished mid-game for any reason (manually deleted, for instance), every subsequent message the bot tried to post into it — including the ones meant to report that very error back to the player — would itself fail the same way, cascading into an unhandled crash that took down the entire /solo_shiritori command rather than just quietly ending that one game. Every message the bot posts into a solo game's thread is now sent through a helper that catches this specific failure and ends the game cleanly instead.

Statistics

Solo Shiritori results are recorded per player: rounds played, hyphens used, apostrophes used, unique words played, and longest word. The player also earns experience toward their level for each valid word played. These stats can be viewed with /solo_stats and compared with /solo_leaderboard, both of which offer a Public/Private visibility choice; the leaderboard can additionally be sorted by Longest Word, Turns Played, or Dictionary Completion.

See also

• Super-Shiritori
• Multiplayer Shiritori
• AI Bots
• Achievements