What’s new in v01.03.05
Bonus Words 2.0 (multiplier scoring)
Bonus Words aren’t a novelty anymore—they’re a strategy. When you build your sentence around Bonus Words and receive at least 2 votes, you’ll earn:
- 1st word: +10 points
- 2nd word: +20
- 3rd word: +40 That’s +70 points for three in a round. Any words beyond the third (super rare) are +10 each.
We also added a new announcement effect when you land a Bonus Word so the moment feels tactile, funny, and satisfying.
How to get Bonus Words
- Character abilities can grant (or remove) them—timing abilities matters more now.
- Catch-up rule: if you’re in the bottom half, you’ll always have at least 2 Bonus Words tied to your character’s lore.
- Themes: some themes hand out more. In Pirate, you can buy up to 3 words at each port—now very valuable.
Please tell us how this feels—we’ll keep tuning based on your feedback.
Other improvements
- More consistent text rendering while typing
- Fixed unintended “vote for yourself” bug
- Faster gold distribution when lots of gold is awarded (Pirate)
- Pirate gold conversion now always converts all gold to points
- Fixed ink blob animations throughout menus
- Fixed Scriptorium shadows across resolutions
- Reduced duration/particle count for Pirate gold-earn VFX
- Clearer bundle rotation in Marketplace
- Fixed scrolling issues (Escape menu, Lobby, Market)
- Fixed tooltip spam that showed “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”
- Fixed rare story display bug with very long words/sentences
- Fixed redeem code button missing in certain cases
Coming up:
Sept 16 — Bumbly’s Rockin’ Adventure (LTM)
Everyone plays as Bumbly. Start with a Mad Libs–style Madtag sheet, write around your tags, and during voting someone else’s tag can replace yours for maximum chaos. If your tag appears in the winning sentence, you also score. Then jump into Keytar Hero, our synthwave typing mini-game.
Limited-time: runs ~1 month starting Sept 16. Unlockable content (including Bumbly) during the event.
October — Season Launch: Elves vs Samurai
Teams split into Elves and Samurai. Tight votes can trigger duels to swing the round, and you’ll earn War Points for your side. At game end, the faction with the most War Points gets a big bonus that can flip the outcome.
From the team: where we’re headed (and why)
We’ve been honest that Early Access is an adventure. Write Warz started as a competitive writing game with a light, cosmetics-only economy. Along the way we learned two big things: 1) the systems we built around progression and monetization didn’t land the way we hoped, and 2) the game absolutely shines when it’s treated like a party game, friends laughing, tossing lines back and forth, and celebrating the clever (or unhinged) sentence that wins the round.
So we’re steering toward what feels best to play and most sustainable to support.
First, the good news for anyone jumping in: Horror and Pirate will remain free so there’s always a base set of themes you can enjoy without spending a dime. Starting with Elves vs Samurai in October, our new seasonal themes will be DLC. We bundle everything that used to be a grind including fonts and colors, characters, emotes etc. So if you pick up a theme you get the full package instantly. It’s cleaner, clearer, and it lets us fund more of the content you actually play.
We’re also making this easier for groups: only the host needs to own a DLC for everyone to play that theme together. If there are six of you, get one friend to grab the pack and the whole table can jump in. We’ll still have a few bigger cosmetic bundles in the store, but most new goodies will live inside each seasonal theme where they belong.
Another change: for now, we’re putting matchmaking on the shelf. The best sessions we see are with friends—online or in the same room—so we’re designing around that. Bots remain in Custom Games to fill a seat or two, and we’ll keep listening if you want other ways to find players later.
To make party nights even easier, we’re heads-down on phone play. The goal is simple: host on a computer (more platforms to come), and let everyone else join from their phones, Jackbox-style. This takes engineering time, and we want to do it right, but it’s a top priority for the next few months.
Finally, a small tease: pieces are already falling into place for Season 2, a Dungeons-and-Dragons-themed season we’re very excited about. We’ll share more when it’s closer.
If you’ve been with us through the experiments and growing pains - thank you. These changes are about making the game feel as joyful as the nights you’ve already shared, while giving us a sustainable way to keep building new themes, characters, and modes. Tell us what works, what doesn’t, and what you want next. We’re listening, and we’re building Write Warz with you.