Near Miss

The game

A secret word hides inside a hand-built word-web of 35 semantic families. Every guess you type is scored by how close its meaning sits to the target — the mercury climbs from freezing to boiling on a giant mid-century thermometer. Your chain of readings, hottest first, plus each word's family label and the hot/cold clues, is what you reason with. The whole thing is dressed in mustard-and-teal atomic-age retro: a huge temperature dial with a jittering needle, orbiting electrons, starbursts and boomerangs.

How to play

• Type any word into the box and press Enter (or Check) — the dial reads its semantic temperature against the secret, from 0° to 100°.
• You have 6 guesses. A reading of 100° (typing the secret itself) scores a DIRECT HIT and wins the round.
• Watch the chain panel: rows sort hottest first, each showing the word's family (◈ means you are inside the target web), whether the link is hand-set or ≈ approximated, and a ▲/▼ delta vs your last guess.
• Hot guesses unlock clues: past 55° you learn the word length, past 74° its first letter, past 88° its last letter too.
• Run out of guesses and you get OUT OF MERCURY — the word stays frozen, scored by your peak temperature.
• Esc or P pauses, R starts a fresh secret, M mutes.