Causeway is a daily word game. You are given two words and have to travel from one to the other by stepping through related words, as fast as you can. Everyone gets the same pair each day, and you get one attempt.
Every word in the game sits in a network built from ConceptNet Numberbatch, a set of word representations assembled partly from human-curated knowledge rather than purely from statistical co-occurrence in text. That distinction matters: a purely statistical model will happily tell you that pizza and bell are related, because Taco Bell appears in a lot of restaurant writing. Numberbatch gives you cheese, dough and slice instead, which is what a person would expect.
From that network, each word keeps its twelve nearest neighbours, and those are your legal moves. The game always shows you the full list, so you never have to guess what counts.
Puzzles are not picked at random. Each candidate pair is filtered so that:
Ten thousand common English words, filtered to remove proper nouns, abbreviations, inflected forms and anything offensive. A second, smaller list of words stays playable as a step along the way but is never used as the start or end of a day's puzzle — passing through a difficult word by chance is one thing, being handed it as the subject of your day is another.
No accounts, no tracking, no app. Your results are stored in your own browser. The only thing sent to us is an anonymous completion time, so the game can show you where you placed against everyone else - it carries no name, cookie or device id and cannot be traced back to you. See the privacy page for the detail.
Bug reports, a puzzle that felt wrong, or anything else: hello@causeway.day. Reports of pairs that felt unfair are genuinely useful — they are how the filters get better.