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Seattle natives Calli Fuchigami and Eden Ghirmai founded Flying Comet Games and built Wordy-verse, a collection of browser-based word puzzles that uses a familiar Wordle-like interaction but swaps the universal word list for themed categories. Its Seattle edition can draw on local streets, businesses and cultural references—including “Dicks,” a reference to Dick’s Drive-In—turning a simple guessing game into a test of regional knowledge.
This account reflects GeekWire’s November 30, 2024 report. That article describes an early-stage company and does not establish Flying Comet’s operating status, pricing, audience or business results in 2026.
Who founded Flying Comet Games?
Fuchigami and Ghirmai grew up in the Seattle area and both attended Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, Washington. By the time GeekWire profiled the company, they had moved to the Bay Area but were building a product around the place they knew best.
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Fuchigami had worked in finance at game companies. Ghirmai studied at the University of Washington and had worked at Google and Slack. Their move into games was an entrepreneurial experiment: instead of continuing conventional technology careers, they decided to build an independent company and test several ideas.
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The company was still a two-person operation in the 2024 report. “Tech vets” describes their technology and games-related backgrounds, not a documented record of running a large studio.
What is Wordy-verse?
Wordy-verse is a family of themed word puzzles. The core interaction resembles Wordle: players submit guesses and use feedback about letters and positions to solve an answer. The important difference is the organizing principle. Rather than one shared, general-audience daily word, Wordy-verse groups puzzles around subjects that players can choose.
GeekWire reported 13 categories, including Seattle, Friends, Survivor, yoga, gymnastics, Animal Crossing, boba tea, accounting and Y Combinator. The categories do not all have to follow the conventional five-letter-word assumption. The Y Combinator theme, for example, can use three-letter technology or business acronyms.
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That makes the format potentially reusable: the same basic game can serve a fandom, profession, community or publication if the category has a sufficiently strong vocabulary and an editor willing to curate it.
Why the Seattle edition is different
The Seattle version is more than a city label applied to a generic word list. It can use proper nouns and references to local businesses, streets and other institutions—types of answers not normally associated with the standard Wordle format described in the GeekWire story.
“Dicks” was cited as a recent answer, referring to Seattle burger chain Dick’s Drive-In. For a local player, that can be an immediate recognition moment. For someone elsewhere, it may be obscure or ambiguous. Fuchigami described the intended effect as an inside joke or shared reference: the puzzle rewards membership in a place-based culture.
That is also the edition’s central trade-off. Local clues create identity and a sense of belonging, but they can reduce fairness for newcomers. Street names may have alternate spellings; businesses may be known by nicknames; and a reference that feels obvious to one neighborhood may be invisible to another. A strong local puzzle therefore needs careful editing, explanations or other ways to keep unfamiliar players from feeling that they are guessing trivia rather than words.
At the time of the report, Flying Comet was concentrating on Seattle rather than immediately producing versions for other cities. That was a focus choice, not evidence that Seattle is permanently the only city edition.
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Why build around a Wordle-like format?
Both founders were fans of Wordle and other New York Times games. A familiar interaction lowers the learning curve: players already understand the satisfaction of making a guess, interpreting feedback and sharing a result. The themed system then adds a reason to return beyond a single general puzzle.
For a small studio, this is an efficient product hypothesis. One underlying game engine can support many editorial packages. The challenge is that every category must have enough recognizable, well-curated answers to remain fun. A large menu of themes is not automatically valuable if some lists are thin, repetitive or dominated by obscure terms.
Flying Comet was experimenting beyond word puzzles
Wordy-verse was not the company’s only project. GeekWire reported that the founders were experimenting with approximately eight other mini-games. One named project was Keep Bufo Alive, an app-based clicker game that had attracted more than 600 players at the time of reporting.
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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →That figure is historical, from November 2024; it is not a current player count. The project also illustrates the founders’ learning strategy: a small, casual game can provide a way to study game mechanics without the production demands of a conventional console or large mobile title.
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The business model was still a plan
Fuchigami and Ghirmai said they hoped eventually to monetize through subscriptions, broadly echoing The New York Times’ games model. They also discussed selling or licensing customizable games to smaller publications and websites, allowing a publisher to put a branded or community-specific puzzle in front of its own audience.
The available reporting does not confirm a subscription launch, a price, paid conversion, revenue, advertising arrangement, funding or a signed publisher deal. Those ideas should be understood as prospective strategies, not an established business model. The appeal is clear: a publisher could receive a tailored game without building its own puzzle system. The risk is equally clear: casual players may resist paying for a product designed to occupy only a few minutes a day, while a publisher-customization business requires dependable editorial tools and support.
How Wordle branding and legal risk fit in
Flying Comet used “Wordle-style” as a description but avoided putting “Wordle” in its own site branding. That distinction matters. Game mechanics are not the same thing as a brand name, logo, interface artwork, text or code. Each can raise different intellectual-property questions.
The GeekWire article noted that The New York Times had pursued some Wordle-inspired game makers over copyright-infringement claims. It did not report that Flying Comet had been sued, contacted or accused of infringement. Nothing in the available source supports a definitive legal conclusion about Wordy-verse. The safest description is that it is an independent game using similar, familiar mechanics while maintaining separate branding.
What the 2024 profile does—and does not—tell us
The story establishes the founders, the Seattle-first concept, the reported category lineup, early experimentation and proposed monetization. It does not establish what happened afterward. As of the evidence supplied here, there is no verified 2026 account of whether Flying Comet is still operating, whether Wordy-verse remains available, whether subscriptions launched, how many people play, whether other cities were added, or whether publisher-customization deals materialized.
Those unanswered questions are important because the concept’s promise depends on execution: puzzle quality, mobile performance, accessibility, moderation of proper nouns, privacy practices and enough fresh categories to justify repeat use. The core idea is straightforward, but the durable business question is harder: can local knowledge and niche communities make a familiar puzzle mechanic valuable enough to support a studio?
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