About
Coverword is an online take on the party game Undercover, built to answer one question: can the word pairs be generated automatically rather than written by hand?
The project
In a classic Undercover, somebody writes a list of pairs. That takes time, and more importantly it runs out: after a few evenings the words come back. The starting idea was to pull those pairs from semantic databases — resources that describe how close words are in meaning.
The intuition alone did not work. Measured against hand-labelled pairs, raw semantic closeness does not separate the good from the bad: it puts guitar / violin (a good pair) and pirate / piracy (an unplayable one) at exactly the same level. Filters that ignore meaning had to be added: morphology, a lexical network, a measure of abstraction.
The result comes down to three numbers: 2,945 pairs, 1,685 words, in French and English. The method is described on the rules page.
How it is built
- The words come from a vector model trained on large corpora, crossed with a frequency lexicon and a lexical network. All of it is computed offline: the game only draws from a fixed list.
- The server holds all state. Your word never leaves the server towards other players — it is not hidden in the display, it is simply never sent.
- No account, no sign-up. A room, a four-character code, and that is all.
- The avatars come from the free Notionists set (DiceBear, CC0 licence), pre-generated and served from this site. No third-party service is called during a game.
Hosting
The site runs on a personal machine, not with a commercial host. It is a project made for fun, with no company behind it and no business model — at best a few ads to cover the domain name.
One practical consequence: the site may be unavailable for a few minutes during an update or a restart. Games in progress are lost, since their state lives in memory.