Word Bocce

How to play

1. The yellow jack is the target word. Your ball starts out as the start word (the dashed circle).
2. Tap tiles to build a throw: tap once to add a word, again to subtract it, a third time to take it back. Up to three tiles per throw.
   king − man + woman → lands by queen
3. Why that works: the game stores each word as a list of 100 numbers, learned from how the word is used across billions of words of text. Words used in similar ways get similar lists. A throw adds and subtracts those lists, so the ball really moves through meaning.
4. How close is close? After a throw, list all 40,000 words from closest in meaning to your ball to farthest. The jack's place in that list is its rank. Rank #12 means eleven words are closer to your ball than the jack is. Rank #1 means the jack is the closest word of all: a bacio (Italian for "kiss", a ball touching the jack).
5. The dotted rings on the court mark ranks: inside "top 10" the jack is among the ten closest words, and so on out to 10,000.
6. You get four balls per round and your best one counts. At the end you'll see par, the best throw your hand allowed.

Versus follows real bocce: whoever is farther from the jack throws next. When both sides are out of balls, the side with the closest ball wins the round and scores a point for each of its balls that is closer than the other side's best.

Anything with a ? or a dotted underline explains itself when you tap or hover on it.