Word game with friends
Last updated: 2026-08-09
Challenge mode in Hot & Cold skips the scheduling. You create a room, share one link, and everyone who joins plays the same secret word each round. Play it together when everyone's around, or drop in when you get a spare minute: you can join a round that's already running, and nobody is locked out for showing up late. It's not a race either, unless the host puts a timer on it. Everyone can go head to head, or you can split the room into teams that share a board and solve the word together. Either way there's chat in the room, including a spoiler-safe channel for the people who've finished.
How playing with friends works
A room is a series of rounds, not a single puzzle. As host, you send the link to whoever you want in the game and start each round; the secret itself is picked at random by the server, so you're playing on the same footing as everyone you invited rather than setting a word you already know. Everyone guesses the same answer, and every guess is ranked by how close it lands in meaning to that secret, scored against about 15,000 words from 🥶 freezing all the way to 🌋 blazing. When a round wraps, it hands out podium-style points: the best round score takes the biggest share, second-best the next, and so on down the field, the way a Grand Prix pays out places. Those points accumulate round after round until the room resets. Miss a round entirely and you can still catch the next one.
Play as teams
If you'd rather your group solved a word together than beat each other to it, the host can switch the room into team mode and split it into anywhere from 2 to 4 teams: Fire, Ice, Sun and Snow. A team shares one board. Every guess a teammate makes lands on your screen as they make it, hints they spend are hints you get to read, and a word one of you has already tried isn't wasted on the rest. Instead of circling the answer alone, you're reading someone else's angle on it and pushing off in a direction they haven't covered.
Because the board is shared, so is the result. Whoever on the team lands the secret wins the round for all of you, and giving up is a vote rather than an exit: the team's round only ends once everyone has thrown in the towel, and typing another guess takes your vote back. Each team's board is scored once and the boards are placed against each other: 12 points for the best, 8 for second and 5 for third, with tied boards splitting the places they cover. Teams sort themselves out automatically as people join, and the host can shuffle everyone, seat people by hand, or lock the line-up once it's settled.
Talk while you play
Rooms have chat built in, so the coordinating happens where the game is. It runs in the lobby while you're agreeing on settings and in the round itself while you're guessing, and it comes in 3 channels: everyone in the room, just your team, and a spoilers channel that stays sealed until you've finished the round. The spoilers channel is where the people who are done argue about how obvious the answer was, with no risk of leaking it: the server won't send those messages to anyone still guessing. Finish the round and the whole backlog arrives at once.
No spoilers, ever
The only things that travel between opponents are similarity ranks and display names. The secret never crosses, and neither does a single word anyone typed. You'll see that a friend landed a "hot" guess or nudged into the top few, but never what they guessed, so their progress can't hand you the answer. Teammates are the one exception, since sharing a board is the whole point of team mode: your team sees your words, and the teams you're playing against still don't.
What the host decides
The room's rules are set once, up front: an optional countdown timer that defaults to 5 minutes, whether the in-round Help menu is available, and whether the secret's letter count is shown to everyone for free. Help is room-wide, and word hints and each of the two letter reveals switch on and off separately. With all of it on, every player gets up to 3 word hints of their own per round plus the option to buy a reveal, and what you buy stays private to you. Team rounds offer hints, voted on by the team, but no letter reveals, since a shared board carries one score for everybody on it. Giving up shows the top 50 closest words, so every round ends with the answer in view. The full ruleset is on how to play, and strategy tips help you climb the podium in fewer guesses.
Challenge is free in your browser and plays the same on the iOS and Android apps. Mobile adds an offline challenge-a-bot mode: a single Hot & Cold round against a locally generated opponent, no connection and no room link involved. If you'd rather everyone worldwide faced the same word, the daily word game does that, and endless mode is there for solo practice between rounds.