vocab.party

A vocabulary game. For 9-to-11 year olds.

Currently being played by a small cohort getting ready for the UK 11+.

How do you get a ten-year-old to do vocabulary?

The honest answer is most parents end up nagging, and most kids resist. We've been there. So we built the alternative we wanted for our own ten-year-old.

Vocab.Party is a small daily session — ten minutes, maybe fifteen — where the words she's learning are the things she does in the game. A game where vocabulary is the move.

She plays it because it's a game. The 11+ readiness arrives as a side effect of that.

What we did with the curriculum.

We cross-referenced ten of the canonical 11+ word lists — roughly 1,370 unique words between them — and built a curriculum of 200 words across 25 themed batches, with another 200 queued for later.

Each word arrives with its cluster: three or four synonyms, two opposites. Words are remembered in families, not in isolation.

Spaced repetition handles the resurfacing. Spelling is treated as its own dimension of mastery, tested separately from meaning. Example sentences are hand-written — every one a small scene, not cookbook prose.

What ten minutes looks like.

A child sits down. Five new words from their current batch arrive as little puzzles — an anagram, a riddle, a rhyme — each one shaped to suit the word. They solve their way into the meaning rather than reading it.

Then a quick round of recall: synonyms and opposites of words they've met before, falling or floating across the screen. They use one of the new words in their own sentence; the AI reacts to what they wrote.

Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Five message credits to spend on their friends. Done for the day.

Words become tools.

Each session unlocks games built around the words. Checkers played with vocabulary on the pieces. Battleship where each square holds a word from the same cluster. The kids play because the games are fun; the words get reinforced as a side effect.

Our ten-year-old told us the thing she loves most about games is playing with friends. So we made the game social. Parents approve a small group — up to five children — and the kids play those vocabulary games together inside it. They earn short messages by finishing sessions, one per word learned, and spend them in the same group.

The words don't sit on a flashcard waiting to be tested. They go to work — for the kid, with the kid's friends. A word a child has used to win a round of checkers against a school friend is a word they remember.

Try a round.

Each base reached — eight in total, paced by sessions — unlocks new ways to play: Battleship, Mountain, group games. The first ones are open from the start.

The smallest taste of the game is below. Tap the letters in order to unscramble the word. No signup, no score — just the shape of a single round.

What's true about the data.

Children’s data.Children's Code aligned. UK GDPR. A DPIA is completed and available on request.

Tracking.No cookies. No third-party trackers. Analytics is cookieless; events are tagged by internal numeric IDs — never by name, email, or username.

Where data lives.The database is in the EU (Supabase, Frankfurt). The site is hosted on Vercel.

The AI.The model in the game is Anthropic's Claude. We have a zero-data-retention agreement with Anthropic — prompts are not stored, not used for training, and never include your child's name or any identifier. AI is used for in-session hints, for judging the effort behind a written sentence, and for a small amount of presence in the game. Not to replace teachers.

What we don’t do.No strangers in the game. No paid unlocks. No streaks designed to guilt your child back in.

Invite-only, for now.

We're running with a small first cohort — friends, family, parents from schools we know personally. Not a public launch.

If you've been given a code, the button is for you. If not, there's no waitlist — we're not collecting emails. Invitations come through the cohort.