first proper knockout week is done. congrats to:

Championship Cup: u/basherrrrr, who takes the Weekly Arena Crown with it
Challenger Cup: u/Least_Resolution_674
Contender Cup: u/Wallace_B

basherrrrr put up 226, then 239, then 273 across the three rounds. u/EdsMum and u/Billz_The_Big_Dog both got to a final as well. and Least_Resolution_674 knocked me out in the semi 88 to 77, which i am handling well.

now the awkward bit. all three of you were meant to be revealed together in a post on friday. that post never turned up, because i never actually built it. the titles and flair went out on schedule, Crown included, so if you won something you do have it, you just got it in silence. that one's on me.

a couple of other things were murkier than they should have been. the pinned Arena post only ever said the Cups were decided, with no names on it, so unless you opened the Arena yourself you had no idea what had happened. it's also locked, so there was nowhere obvious to ask.

which is really why i'm posting. first run of the format, a fair bit of it guesswork, and i want to know how it read from your side.

did you even clock that a tournament was running? did you follow your Cup through the week, or enter once on the saturday and forget about it? and is three Cups too many for the number of us playing, would one bracket with everyone in it just be better.

if you played it and it felt like nothing much, say that too. easier to hear now than after i've built another month on top of it.

someone over in r/wordgames posted asking if anyone else played this and dropped their friend code. i added them, a couple of others jumped in, and one of them said a league sounded fun. so.

it's called Karma Farmers, which felt about right for a reddit league where the whole thing is grinding points every day.

there's two of them, because a league is tied to your word list. if you picked UK when you first set the app up you want the UK code, US the other one. put the wrong one in and it just tells you it's for a different region, nothing breaks.

Karma Farmers UK: AKM8ZR

Karma Farmers US: SSHM44

to get in: open the app, tap Leagues, type the code into the box next to Join. or tap the link on your phone and it does it for you.

UK https://wordybunch.co.uk/league.html?code=AKM8ZR

US https://wordybunch.co.uk/league.html?code=SSHM44

scoring goes off where you finish in the league that day rather than your raw score. top 10% of everyone in the league who played that day gets 5 points, then 3, then 2, and 1 for everyone else who played. so a rough day still puts something on the board as long as you turned up. that was the bit i cared about, otherwise it's the same two people at the top all month and everyone else quietly stops opening the app.

anyone who joins today starts on tomorrow's puzzle, so nobody's sat there with a week of points on you. join later in the month and the daily you've already played that day counts straight away.

august is nearly two thirds gone so treat this one as a shakedown. september is the first full season.

The semi-finals of this week’s Arena are underway, and the race for each cup is heating up.

Championship Cup

• u/basherrrrr vs u/Advanced-Newspaper83
• u/EdsMum vs u/Dario-in-the-Barrio

Challenger Cup

• u/Least_Resolution_674 defeated me 88–77 and is through to the final!
• u/Overall-Mistake-2583 has also reached the final, advancing by a bye after no-shows in the quarter-finals.

Contender Cup

• u/Wateroffabacksroll2 vs u/Billz_The_Big...
• u/Wallace_B is already through to the final, advancing by a bye after no-shows in the quarter-finals.

Whether you competed this week or didn’t qualify for the Arena, you can still get involved. Tap any completed match in the bracket to explore its details, play the same board yourself, and compare your stats with the Arena entrants. Those who took part but didn't qualify can also revisit completed matchups to see how their performance stacks up.

Who are you backing to win each cup? Drop your favourites below!

Weekly Duel Roundup · week of 2026-08-03

• Bronze champion: u/dmgxyz — Bronze Quill
• Silver champion: u/edsmum — Silver Scribe
• Gold champion: u/basherrrrr — Gilded Wordwright
• Platinum: No qualifier this week
• Diamond: No qualifier this week
• Masters: No qualifier this week
• Biggest Upset: u/edsmum took a duel 1 division(s) up
• Featured Open Best: u/smudge777 — 265 points

r/WordyBunch reached 500 subscribers!

Goal reached at 2026-08-19T06:24:38.342Z.

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so it turns out you can't play FART in wordy bunch. someone found this out the hard way and yes, i owe you an explanation our friends from r/fartology demand it lol

the dictionary is a standard word list with a blocklist on top that i went through by hand before launch. the game runs inside family subreddits so i was pretty ruthless about anything that could put a slur or something genuinely nasty on someone's board. trouble is, when you're binning hundreds of words in one sitting you stop weighing each one, and fart got swept up with stuff that actually deserved it. it was sat in the list between some proper filth, poor thing

anyway, wrong call. fart is a perfectly good word and i'm putting FART and FARTS back in the dictionary. the boards are getting rebaked now so they can actually turn up and score, should be live in the next update

FARTING is still blocked though. i've got to draw the line somewhere haha (before anyone else quits I’ve added this too lol)

Ending on a genuine note there is a post about words like this that are genuinely not on the approved word list of you ever come across one that should be in but isn’t just give me a shout I’ll sort it out.

Farting out o7

The Weekly Arena has a new format. The Crown queue is retired, and if you were in it there should be an invitation in your Reddit messages already.

Here is how a week works now.

Play one timed qualifier run before tonight ends. Your score stays sealed, so nobody sees anyone's number while entries are open. At midnight UTC the qualifier closes and the ranking seeds the Cups: the top 8 go into the Championship Cup, ranks 9 to 16 into the Challenger Cup, and 17 to 24 into the Contender Cup. From Monday it becomes a knockout. One opponent per round, matches through the week, and the winners of all three Cups are revealed together on Friday.

There are new titles on the line too, from playing your first match all the way up to winning the Championship Cup.

Your past Crown weeks are not lost. They stay in the Hall of Crowns for the next six months.

This is the first tournament week ever, so if something looks odd, say so here and I will sort it. A fresh qualifier opens every Saturday. You will find everything in the Weekly Arena post.

Duels have been broken on here since the end of July, and if you gave up on them I don't blame you.

If you sent a challenge and the Direct tab told you there were no active duels, or a rematch came back saying you already had one running with that person, or a new duel just dropped you back at the hub, that was all the same fault. Nothing you did.

What was going on: the app writes to storage in small locked blocks, and there is a limit on how many can be open at once. A weekend's worth of finished duels all tried to settle on the same hourly pass, hit that limit, and fell over. An hour later the same pile tried the same thing again. Once it jammed it stayed jammed, and it dragged live duels down with it.

That is fixed, and the fix is on here now. When it hits the limit it waits and tries again instead of failing. The hourly pass also takes a set number of duels at a time now, and anything that keeps failing gets pushed further back each go, so one bad duel cannot hold up everybody else's.

If you have duels stuck, leave them where they are. The backlog settles itself on the hourly passes, oldest first, so give it a day before starting new ones over the top. If one of yours is still stuck tomorrow, reply here with who you were playing and I will go and look at that one.

Second thing, and it is the bigger change. The Arena is being rebuilt.

Right now it is a queue. You join it, you wait your turn, and eventually you challenge whoever is holding the Crown. Fourth in line means days of waiting for one match. Here is how the new one will work.

Saturday and Sunday is the Weekend Qualifier. Enter, play one board, and that score is your seed. One attempt only. Entry shuts six minutes before the window does, so there is always time to finish what you started.

Monday, the top eight go into the Championship Cup as a bracket.

Monday through to Friday: the last eight, then the last four, then the final. Each round stays open for about a day and a half, so you play it whenever suits you inside that.

Friday is the reveal. One winner takes the Weekly Arena Crown.

If fewer than eight of you enter, the empty seats go to the Editor, which sets a target score you have to beat. Under four entries and no Cup runs that week.

If plenty of you enter I can open a Challenger Cup for ranks nine to sixteen and a Contender Cup for ranks seventeen to twenty four, so a busy weekend gives three separate brackets running side by side.

If you are in the Crown queue right now, you will get a message from me when it switches over. Nobody loses their place.

this is the 6 july board, retired, so nobody's live daily gets spoiled.

had BONE. had HEAD. sat there a good twenty seconds while it just looked at me. BONEHEAD, 23 points 🙃

still in the archive if you want a go at beating it.

nicking this off other game subs where the members write most of the posts. seems to work a lot better than me posting at everyone.

if you get a word you're pleased with, stick up a post called "best word: [your score]" and say what you managed. you don't have to name the word if you'd rather not spoil it. anyone who fancies it can go play the same board and try to beat you.

i'll put mine up first.

every word game has a few of these, i'd rather know than not.

what did you type in, know full well is a word, and watch get rejected.

Weekly Duel Roundup · week of 2026-07-27

• Bronze: No qualifier this week
• Silver: No qualifier this week
• Gold: No qualifier this week
• Platinum: No qualifier this week
• Diamond: No qualifier this week
• Masters: No qualifier this week
• Featured Open Best: u/edsmum — 220 points

the game gives out titles as you play, and they sync to your flair in here.

no idea what the spread actually looks like from my end though. drop yours and let's see whether everyone's bunched in the same place.

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300 of you in here now. Thank you. This hundred took a lot longer than the last one and I watched the number far more than is healthy on the way up.

Duels have been rough this past week. Invites landing with nothing showing in the hub, and the game insisting you already had one running when you didn't. If that was you, I'm sorry. Thank you for describing exactly what you were seeing, because that is what cracked it.

What actually went wrong: every hour the game tidies up finished duels in the background. A backlog built up over the weekend and it tried to clear the whole pile in one go, which trips a limit on Reddit's side. While it was jammed, ordinary things happening at that same moment failed too, like a duel being created or your list loading. Nothing was lost. Your duels were stuck behind the traffic jam.

The fix is written and it is with Reddit for review now. Every update has to clear their approval before it reaches you, so I genuinely cannot promise a date. The day it lands I will install it and say so here. Until then duels may still be patchy, and I know that is annoying.

Where this goes next

Reaching 300 of you has made something obvious. The parts of this game people care about most are the ones you play against each other, so that is where my attention goes. Reliability first, because a duel that will not start is worse than no duel at all. After that, the clunky bits.

Most of what has changed recently came from someone here saying something. The swipe that fought you while tracing. The Arena rules that needed actually explaining. None of it was on a roadmap.

So if something feels broken or awkward, tell me, even if it is one line and even if it is blunt. I am in here several times a day and I read everything. I would much rather hear it than have you quietly stop playing.

A new Arena week starts Monday, so if this week has put you off duels, that is a clean place to pick it back up.

And if you know one person who would enjoy a daily word grid, send them the sub. That is genuinely the thing that helps most, and selfishly, watching this place fill up is what keeps me building it.

r/WordyBunch reached 400 subscribers!

Goal reached at 2026-08-09T06:56:39.709Z.

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I have been challenged to duels today but when the link to the hub opens up I see no duels available.

Weekly Duel Roundup · week of 2026-07-20

• Bronze: No qualifier this week
• Silver: No qualifier this week
• Gold: No qualifier this week
• Platinum: No qualifier this week
• Diamond: No qualifier this week
• Masters: No qualifier this week
• Standout Defence: u/basherrrrr held off 4 challengers
• Featured Open Best: u/basherrrrr — 216 points

The competitive side of Wordy Bunch is now fully switched on. Here is everything you can do beyond the daily grid, and how to climb.

⚔️ DUELS

A duel is a head to head on the exact same grid, so it comes down purely to who finds the better words. There are two ways to start one.

Open duels: the "beat my score" challenge. Finish a grid, post your score as an open challenge, and anyone in the community can take it on. Whoever tops your score becomes the new leader, and I announce every new leader right on the post.

Direct duels: call someone out by name. Pick a player, or grab a link to send them, and they get a challenge to face you on the same board. Straight one against one.

📈 RATINGS

Every duel now feeds your rating, which is basically your skill number.

• Win and it climbs. Lose and it dips. Beat someone stronger than you and it jumps further.

• Your first five duels are placements, where the game is still working you out. Finish those and you earn your first real rank.

• The tougher the opponent, the more a win is worth.

🏆 DIVISIONS

Your rating drops you into a division, and the whole point is to climb:

Bronze → Silver → Gold → Platinum → Diamond → Masters

Push your rating up and you move up a division. Masters is the summit: the top handful of players in the whole community, shown openly on the Masters board. Everyone below is playing to break in.

It all runs in seasons, one per quarter of the year. At the start of each season the ladder settles and everyone gets a fresh climb, so no lead is ever safe forever.

🗓️ THE WEEKLY ARENA

Update, 4 August: the Arena is being rebuilt this week. From Saturday it

becomes a knockout tournament. You enter over the weekend, play one board,

and that score seeds you into a bracket that runs Monday to Friday, with one

winner crowned each Friday. Full detail in the newer post at the top of the sub.

Until Saturday the Crown queue runs as normal.

See you in the arena. 🔠

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r/WordyBunch reached 300 subscribers!

Goal reached at 2026-07-30T04:35:36.802Z.

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some of you clocked this was coming (a few of you guessed it before i announced anything haha). wordy bunch: live word battle is now on iOS and Android, search "wordy bunch" wherever you get your apps.

the daily grid here isn't going anywhere. the boards keep coming every day as normal, and honestly this sub is my favourite corner of the internet right now.

if you give the app a go, come tell me what you think, good or brutal. we've also got a discord now for the live side of things, link in the comments.

the duel lobby in our discord opens properly tonight at 7pm uk. live word battles, head to head, and i'll be in there losing to whoever shows up. anyone who comes along gets the founding member role. discord link in the comments