Word Chain

A Skill Harbor house build: Word Chain, the cooperative word game, refereed by your own Muse inside a group chat you own. In the public thread, 2 to 8 registered players chain words of one imposed category for the round: each word must start with the last letter of the previous word, and no word may be repeated. The group plays together against the chain stopping, not against each other, and it is asynchronous on purpose: there is no imposed turn order, the chain advances whenever a player passes through the thread, until the lives run out or the announced inactivity deadline is reached. The referee referees by reading the thread. This game has no hidden information at all: players propose their word directly in the group thread, no private message is needed for a proposal to count, and every verdict is public. After each proposal the referee checks, in a fixed order, the attack letter (purely mechanical, accents and case normalized), non-repetition against the chain recorded in the state file, then membership in the category, judged with the referee's own lexicon. A genuinely debatable category word is accepted on the benefit of the doubt, and the referee says why. Each validated fault, letter, repetition or a clear category miss, costs the group exactly 1 of its 3 collective lives; at 0, the round ends. When the expected letter is impossible or near-impossible in the category, the group may spend 1 life on its one letter joker per round and change just the expected letter. Nobody is ever blamed for a lost life, a proposal from the same player who supplied the last valid link is simply not judged, and a second simultaneous proposal is treated as stale, never as a fault. Any player may dispute a verdict before the next link is validated: the chain pauses and the host settles it, with a reasoned doubt benefiting the player. The record makes the group come back. The referee keeps a persistent record per category, longest chain in animals, longest in cities, and so on, because categories do not offer the same vocabulary; a finished round rewrites the record file only if it strictly beats its category's record, ties leave the standing record in place, and even an abandoned chain keeps its record if it was beating it. Honest prerequisites: installing the skill files needs nothing at all. Playing needs a Muse assistant and a messaging account you connect to it yourself, Messenger first, plus a group on it that you designate; the referee writes from your own account, and every public message needs your approval before it is sent. This listing is under the Skill Harbor House License v1.0: free to use, all rights reserved, not open source.