Product manager ex. game designer with a number of puzzle/word game in operation here.
- Having a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games. If you insist on having a timer consider making it count upwards.
- Additionally as other commenters mentioned is the game is a time trial it needs an explicit “Start” button. Also stop the timer when user is not playing e.g. reading the rules.
- There’s no point of having a “Play again” option for a Wordle style daily game, the thinking part is already done, so any replay is just an exercise in dexterity.
- It’s okay to be US-centric actually, doesn’t matter unless you are very serious about monetizing it, and even then being US-centric will work.
- Consider showing rules for first time users before staring the puzzle.
- Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
>There’s no point of having a “Play again” option for a Wordle style daily game, the thinking part is already done, so any replay is just an exercise in dexterity.
What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?
>Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
That just sounds like your idea for a different type of game. I like his current idea for this game.
>What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?
I generally find it more effective to improve the parts that concern most of the audience, like the timer that is seen by every player. The pass-and-play use case is valid but seems pretty rare.
>That just sounds like your idea for a different type of game. I like his current idea for this game.
Yes, it’s a part of giving feedback, the author might not like any of my comments and is free to ignore them, it’s their game. But why do _you_ seem so irritated about it?
"a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games" 100% agree. I hate the timer on the NY Times mini puzzle. I like these types of simple games for unwinding, and a timer makes it more stressful.
Contrarily, I love the mini timer, because it’s something to beat. The mini is too easy of a puzzle. The NYT crossword is more for the thinking type - it also has a timer, but its less in your face and I don’t feel the pressure.
You can still have that with a count up timer (like the GP suggested) but then you don’t put people off like myself who don’t want to be timed out of games
This reminds me a bit of Boggle which really needs a timer. If anything, the timer on this is too long: I did it in 0:32 and was better than 53% of other users, which suggests to me the timer should be about a minute
> - Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
You've essentially described the Jumble puzzle, which appeared in daily newspapers. It's been around since 1954, but I'm not surprised to see it reinvented since few people get a daily newspaper anymore.
> It’s okay to be US-centric actually, doesn’t matter unless you are very serious about monetizing it, and even then being US-centric will work.
As a European who on a typical day uses/watched/reads more English than my native language, I agree. Except sports teams and other more locally phenomena. Those are the worst.
Some crossword people like having their timers (see NYT Games app for example), but as I’ve mentioned the timers are counting up, not triggering any negative conditions, and can be turned off completely.
The OG Windows 3 solitaire has an option to disable the timer, it's one of the first things I uncheck. I did "speedrun" solitaire in my computer classes for fun, though. :)
Ads aside, I'm curious to know what you think would be a good monetizing strategy for this kind of games (simple, online): subscriptions, sponsorship, donations..?
Unfortunately, I think ads is the most realistic way to go.
Sponsorships and/or donations would be a nice “beer money” bonus.
Subscriptions are PITA and too much hassle unless you’re doing them via some third party and they won’t bring a good amount of money at the “online daily puzzle in a browser” scale.
There are more exotic ways like licensing your puzzles to other sites, like online newspaper puzzle pages, Puzzmo is going in this direction IIRC.
The overarching "thing" in the puzzle is a great idea. Choose a column that spells another answer when you get them all right. Works even if you expand the size of the word grid.
The implication wasn't that people have stopped knowing or using English. The implication was that much of the world, except Russia and her allies, suddenly has a much great deal of resentment toward the US.
If you want a general overview try finding a book called “Fundamentals of Fame Design” by Ernest Adams. It is a sensible intro, after that - just dive into thematic communities and do your own things.
I know nothing about formal game design education sorry.
Also, because the keys "F" and "G" are adjacent in the keyboard layout, I believe you made a typo in the book title where you wrote Fame instead of Game.
Another note I had is: keep the words to a specific category rather than a broad category.
For example: the today’s puzzle of “professional sports teams” had 4/5 of the teams from the NBA. The 5th answer was either the Detroit “Lions” (a professional _American football_ team) or more likely the London “Lions” (a _British_ professional basketball team).
I live in the EU. I have no idea about US hand-egg teams. As long as these are proper words (e.g. Bucks, Lions) and they are not "rizzz" (or whatever other moronic sound comes out of people with 45 IQ) then people will play the game.
Nice concept, but US-centric short/slang sports teams' names is a bit misjudged as the very first puzzle when introducing your new game to an international audience. I solved them because they're (mostly) words rather than them having meaning to me.
I wish there was a more internationally friendly version of NYT Games, they're so fun and I play them daily but a lot US cultural knowledge is required at times
I love cryptic crossword, but there's so many "inside rules" that make them hard to approach for newcomers. It doesn't help that there really aren't a lot of good easy cryptics.
The thing with chess, even if you don't know the rules, you can still play and (potentially) lose the game. If you don't know some random american trivia, you're stuck forever.
For those of you who are put off from trying the game by the category for today’s puzzle being sports, note there are other puzzles from prior days with more general topics.
Click the calendar icon at top of page for the archive.
These are short little words that are not uncommon even if you are not familiar with sportsball teams. If you struggled unscrambling these words, I'd suggest your vocab is just in dire need of expansion.
- It gave me “TCAAN” which stumped me. Afterwards I pasted it into the Internet Anagram Server, which failed to find any acronyms for it. So I can say with some confidence I don’t think it’s a valid word. Suggest making sure you’re using a dictionary similar to Wordle’s one.
- The game should reveal the solution at the end if the player fails to guess any words.
First off, I love the game. Your mom isn't just placating you. It is fun.
Second, I think given all this advice a real clear example can be seen by looking at NYT's Wordle[0]. Instructions are the first thing you see and cover the puzzle. You then click start.
Importantly, the instructions have an example. While the puzzle is extremely intuitive, an example can eliminate almost any ambiguity (intuitive for most people but maybe not kids, non-native English speakers, or just things like someone shoves the game into their friends face. Who knows). There can be a button on the side to show instructions again, which should cover the puzzle and stop the timer.
> Having a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games.
Personally, I like the timer. The game is simple and clearly meant to be played in a small fast setting, so I think this works. Can also reduce pressure (as well as induce) since someone might think "oh, I got 5 minutes to play" instead of having to "sit down".
There's plenty of "thinky games" that have timers: Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are two good examples. Almost any TV game is timed. I don't think there's a problem with this and the pressure can make it fun while also conveying that it won't take a person all day.
> There’s no point of having a “Play again”
Could be good to show solutions. If not, maybe also count "attempts"? IDK
For the benefit of the audience watching, not the player. You wouldn’t want someone consuming the whole show because they do not make a move. There’s little reason to care about time limits on a game someone plays by themselves.
There's a 5 minute timer you can effectively guess all permutations in that time. Ignore the timer. The only real limitation is coming from you.
There needs to be some limit like how wordle limits the number of guesses. The timer is good in that it can put pressure in especially considering how simple the game is. The long length means almost everyone has enough time
A coworker and my wife and I have recently been really enjoying https://bracket.city which is a crossword-clue inspired word game with daily puzzles. It does take a little while to figure out, I'd recommend starting off asking for hints fairly often to decrease frustration, but after a couple weeks my wife and I are on a streak of 3 days of scoring 100.
I thought this was way too hard. I didn't figure out a single word and even failed the tutorial. Seeing everyone loving it makes me feel really stupid.
I'll quite often wind up solving this by a sort of parallel construction, as in rather than getting the hint I can work out what word is supposed to be there based on what's around it. Some of the clues can be really cryptic.
You've had better luck spreading it than I have it sounds like. Everyone I've mentioned it to has said "It's too hard" and I don't think has really even given it a shot.
My first wrong answer was an international spelling issue. It would be nice if it accepted then silently corrected based on equivalent international spellings, but I can also understand why it doesn't, sometimes it might be more crucial to the solution.
Just worked through a lot of the puzzles. I love the concept, and I also like how the timer doesn't reset when you switch between them.
3 pieces of feedback:
1. Since your time matters, a start button before a new puzzle is presented would be nice.
2. I wanted to play more puzzles but didn't realize the calendar button up top switched puzzles till reading comments. I think fading the screen with an overlay with the existing buttons and adding a "Play Another?" button would hook people in more.
3. Some of the scrambles are too easy. Maybe that's by design, but an example is "PAWSN" in the apr 4th chess puzzle, it's stupidly obvious compared to the other words.
But again really awesome content and would make an amazing mobile website or app.
One small piece of feedback: typically these games do not allow proper nouns, because there’s too many of them. So having “Catan” be a valid word is pretty awful.
Nice game. Tedious to use on a laptop with a trackpad. You should allow keyboard input.
Managing accounts is a huge headache both for yourself and for your users. It's a bunch of code and responsibility for you to manage people's private data securely. It's one more password to manage for your users. You could just use cookies to track daily progress, like catfishing.net does. So what if that doesn't let me have my data available across browsers? It's just a game, tracking progress does not matter that much.
Today's challenge ("Sports Teams") was particularly easy because each one was plural. That made each one "unscramble a 4 letter word" instead of a 5. Might be a consideration for the future.
Nice UI, but I think someone needs to say it: there's no novel concept here, I've seen the exact same game printed in magazines and on kids' menus. If you're trying to catch people's attention, you need a clever gimmick that they haven't seen before.
Yeah, I don't really get it. Five unrelated anagrams? I was expecting something to happen but it's just the anagrams that I did in a fraction of the time given despite not having a clue what sports those teams play, assuming they exist.
- let me use keyboard input
- don't include proper nouns! I did't get catan because I wasn't expecting that
- show the answers at the end. Still didn't get catan after, and anagram solvers didn't find it. It was only when I came here that I saw the answer
I agree, today's challenge was really easy. But I did enjoy the other days, I played all of them!
What I'd like is an option to show the answers after failing (not by default, so you can still choose to replay if you want). For instance, I cannot for the life of me get the music act that's associated with "FALMO".
For anyone interested in word games there's a very fun and free wordle like game I ended up playing daily for the past year, check out https://www.threemagicwords.app/
I'm not the author so this is not a shameless plug, just a good game that is playable on your phone without installing any app.
- love the concept, it was unclear at first how to delete a single letter when the button clears the whole word.
- I see the comments about a timer but maybe the user can have the option to enable/disable.
- Ability to make words more challenging
- ability to play previous day games
- pop-up instructions for new users - would my mom know what to do when playing for the first time?
What I don't get is whether the mechanics of selecting letters are supposed to be significant. It's pretty odd to click `a b c`, then missclick `a` again and end up with `b c` which means I have to click `b` and `c` only to go for `a b c d` all over again
While the game is ok, there's unfortunately a problem on Firefox on Android.
I know, who cares, only three people in the planet use Firefox on Android. But if you want to know anyway...
The problem is the sizes are not adjusted correctly and so the fixed header/upper part overlaps the scrambled word list, almost completely hiding the first word. You can, through some tricky scrolling, manage to see it and then solve it. But it's tricky. And ugly.
Fwiw, I am one of the other two people with Firefox on Android and am not having this issue, so it might be a question of screen size rather than browser?
On an older iPad I get "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.whatsit.today (see the browser console for more information)." neatly centred on an otherwise blank page.
I think it has some potential, but I found today’s puzzle just too easy. I never play for speed, but even if I was, playing on a iPhone, it missed a lot of touches that I only noticed when I was typing a few letters ahead. So I had to come back, erase what I typed and start over. It was annoying already, but if I was playing for speed, it would be a deal breaker.
I’m not much of a puzzler, I like a crossword or a sudoku and that’s all really - but I didn’t understand what I was meant to do?
Edit; oh ok I get it now..
It could be fun but now I know what to do it’s not very challenging. The speed is more determined by the speed I can type that the words. Maybe one letter longer?
Same! However, I think the OP has done a good job. On mini games like this, I guess it doesn't bother me. I only get frustrated if I have invested time and they throw a timer in. Such a dated mechanic.
Nice! One nit: if playing an archive game (from a previous date), when opening the calendar, would you show not the current month, but the month of the game? This would make it easier to go back to other dates.
Fun game but you should disallow plurals. Overall I’d say use the same word rules as Wordle. Almost all my words were plurals and so were uninteresting, but if that was fixed I would play this!
I made a word game while playing with a few ideas, like anonymous usernames and leaderboards. I still poke at some aspects of it. There’s a rare scoring bug I need to isolate and fix. Anyhow, feel free to look. :)
Edit: coming up with a reasonable algorithm for scoring is far more difficult than it looks. I guess most of the word games floating around don't have scoring for a reason.
It's nice but it takes a million clicks to get to another day's puzzle. Tap to close the results page, Tap the toast to show the close button, tap the close button, tap the calendar, tap the day. Maybe some big left and right arrows at the top of the page?
First of all, great game, just the kind I love. Personally, I love the timer. I can see varying opinions though. Perhaps a toggle for easy mode (no timer) or hard mode (timer, track and beat your own time)
This reminds me a lot of NYT strands, in the sense that it’s “multiple themed rounds of classic word game format X” In the strands example, the base word game is a word search in which they break the rules a bit to make it harder. Here it’s a simple word unscrambling. Makes me wonder what other games you could make by following this “themed rounds of X” format.
This was super fun and just played the whole back catalogue.
SPOILER BELOW
Took a few games to notice but one minor issue is that in each game the pattern for each row is the same, e.g 3rd row is 2,4,1,3,5. Randomising this would make it better.
Neat! I played a few days :) the only issue I had was that I found it quite easy to tap a previously selected letter, and that’d mess me up especially if it wasn’t the last letter so far in that word. I think it’d probably be better to add a backspace button in addition to the clear one, and not deselect letters by tapping them.
Couple of minor bugs, one of which is arguably not a bug:
1. When you play a game for the first time it invites you to make an account. When you make an account, it seems to forget that you played that particular game already.
2. By manipulating the URL you can play games from the future.
I like the calendar where you can go back to play other days. Enhancement request: would be nice for this to have an indicator of which days you have already played.
Fun! I look forward to seeing what future categories and words are. Do you have to manually curate them each day? How big is your backlog? Is there a way to automate it?
thanks a lot :) yes my friend and I are designing the categories and the words manually with a tiny bit of help from AI tools but you can't fully trust them as they try to sneak in 6 and 4 letter words
I have a Wordle-type clone I'm toying with and getting it to wrangle the correct letters is a harder problem than it seems. Hopefully you're able to streamline your design process so it's as painless as possible!
Fascinating glimpse into the potential of AI to enhance development velocity. While the current capabilities are impressive, I wonder about the scalability and generalizability to more complex projects. Definitely a space to watch - tools like this could be transformative for developer productivity if limitations can be overcome.
Product manager ex. game designer with a number of puzzle/word game in operation here.
- Having a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games. If you insist on having a timer consider making it count upwards.
- Additionally as other commenters mentioned is the game is a time trial it needs an explicit “Start” button. Also stop the timer when user is not playing e.g. reading the rules.
- There’s no point of having a “Play again” option for a Wordle style daily game, the thinking part is already done, so any replay is just an exercise in dexterity.
- It’s okay to be US-centric actually, doesn’t matter unless you are very serious about monetizing it, and even then being US-centric will work.
- Consider showing rules for first time users before staring the puzzle.
- Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
>There’s no point of having a “Play again” option for a Wordle style daily game, the thinking part is already done, so any replay is just an exercise in dexterity.
What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?
>Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
That just sounds like your idea for a different type of game. I like his current idea for this game.
>What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?
I generally find it more effective to improve the parts that concern most of the audience, like the timer that is seen by every player. The pass-and-play use case is valid but seems pretty rare.
>That just sounds like your idea for a different type of game. I like his current idea for this game.
Yes, it’s a part of giving feedback, the author might not like any of my comments and is free to ignore them, it’s their game. But why do _you_ seem so irritated about it?
> What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?
then that works better with his suggestion for a timer rather than a countdown
you could retain a challenge aspect by showing average time to solve (or your result compared to others; “You did better than 94% of people!” etc)
"a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games" 100% agree. I hate the timer on the NY Times mini puzzle. I like these types of simple games for unwinding, and a timer makes it more stressful.
Contrarily, I love the mini timer, because it’s something to beat. The mini is too easy of a puzzle. The NYT crossword is more for the thinking type - it also has a timer, but its less in your face and I don’t feel the pressure.
You can still have that with a count up timer (like the GP suggested) but then you don’t put people off like myself who don’t want to be timed out of games
I agree - me and several friends had a rolling text convo where we’d share our mini times each day in a fun daily competition.
Has since faded but anytime I think about it I like to load up the puzzle app and do it.
This reminds me a bit of Boggle which really needs a timer. If anything, the timer on this is too long: I did it in 0:32 and was better than 53% of other users, which suggests to me the timer should be about a minute
Hi! I'm working on a project that could benefit from that kind of experience. Do you offer consulting services?
Sorry, I don't have capacity for more than a few comments here or a casual chat once in a while.
> - Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
You've essentially described the Jumble puzzle, which appeared in daily newspapers. It's been around since 1954, but I'm not surprised to see it reinvented since few people get a daily newspaper anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumble
> It’s okay to be US-centric actually, doesn’t matter unless you are very serious about monetizing it, and even then being US-centric will work.
As a European who on a typical day uses/watched/reads more English than my native language, I agree. Except sports teams and other more locally phenomena. Those are the worst.
I am from the UK, I hate word games that specialise with US English spelling over than British English.
Getting the answer wrong when trying to spell the correct answer in British English spelling ruins the game.
Agree that timers suck the fun out of a game like this. I avoid any solitaire game with a timer for example.
Some crossword people like having their timers (see NYT Games app for example), but as I’ve mentioned the timers are counting up, not triggering any negative conditions, and can be turned off completely.
The OG Windows 3 solitaire has an option to disable the timer, it's one of the first things I uncheck. I did "speedrun" solitaire in my computer classes for fun, though. :)
I think the timer exists since there are only so many 5 letter words. And you have just shown players the letters.
You can complete this by just starting words with the letters available of which there are only so many combinations.
>..you are very serious about monetizing it
Ads aside, I'm curious to know what you think would be a good monetizing strategy for this kind of games (simple, online): subscriptions, sponsorship, donations..?
Unfortunately, I think ads is the most realistic way to go.
Sponsorships and/or donations would be a nice “beer money” bonus.
Subscriptions are PITA and too much hassle unless you’re doing them via some third party and they won’t bring a good amount of money at the “online daily puzzle in a browser” scale.
There are more exotic ways like licensing your puzzles to other sites, like online newspaper puzzle pages, Puzzmo is going in this direction IIRC.
The overarching "thing" in the puzzle is a great idea. Choose a column that spells another answer when you get them all right. Works even if you expand the size of the word grid.
> and even then being US-centric will work.
The world has sadly changed a lot in recent months.
What did I miss, did Trump replace the english language now?
The implication wasn't that people have stopped knowing or using English. The implication was that much of the world, except Russia and her allies, suddenly has a much great deal of resentment toward the US.
There’s a 40% tariff on the letter ‘u’.
_ser paid 40% to incl_de that letter in this comment.
English? Did you mean USAlish?
You mean the American language
Spanish?
Thank you. I really appreciate product people.
This is good feedback. Is there a single resource you would recommend for someone somewhat interested in game design?
If you want a general overview try finding a book called “Fundamentals of Fame Design” by Ernest Adams. It is a sensible intro, after that - just dive into thematic communities and do your own things.
I know nothing about formal game design education sorry.
Thanks for sharing! I found it on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Game-Design-Ernest-Adams...
Also, because the keys "F" and "G" are adjacent in the keyboard layout, I believe you made a typo in the book title where you wrote Fame instead of Game.
I thought for a moment it was a really interesting wordplay which I did not understand.
Yes, sorry about that.
I’d love to learn “fame design” though haha
I agree about the timer. I almost quit after 10 seconds because of the timer.
May be making the countdown optional will be better. I like it!
This is 90% of my thoughts as well.
Another note I had is: keep the words to a specific category rather than a broad category.
For example: the today’s puzzle of “professional sports teams” had 4/5 of the teams from the NBA. The 5th answer was either the Detroit “Lions” (a professional _American football_ team) or more likely the London “Lions” (a _British_ professional basketball team).
I live in the EU. I have no idea about US hand-egg teams. As long as these are proper words (e.g. Bucks, Lions) and they are not "rizzz" (or whatever other moronic sound comes out of people with 45 IQ) then people will play the game.
[flagged]
Thanks , just found a new fun word game!
The timer doesn’t matter.
Nobody needs rules for this game.
Nice concept, but US-centric short/slang sports teams' names is a bit misjudged as the very first puzzle when introducing your new game to an international audience. I solved them because they're (mostly) words rather than them having meaning to me.
I wish there was a more internationally friendly version of NYT Games, they're so fun and I play them daily but a lot US cultural knowledge is required at times
It cuts both ways.
Cryptic Crosswords are almost impenetrable from the US as they're so deep in UK specific words, spellings, and trivia.
I love cryptic crossword, but there's so many "inside rules" that make them hard to approach for newcomers. It doesn't help that there really aren't a lot of good easy cryptics.
Yeah but that's like saying that there are so many "openings" in chess, it makes it hard for newcomers.
That's the game! The 'inside rules' for a cryptic are what makes it cryptic. Without them you just have a word puzzle.
The thing with chess, even if you don't know the rules, you can still play and (potentially) lose the game. If you don't know some random american trivia, you're stuck forever.
there are some good american and canadian cryptics but i agree, it's a largely uk-centred pastime.
Interesting. Any suggestions?
I've looked in the past and didn't have much luck.
lots of suggestions here: https://old.reddit.com/r/crosswords/comments/kqkbrq/what_are...
the new yorker archives are a great place to start https://www.newyorker.com/tag/cryptic-crossword
https://www.minutecryptic.com/
Yep, didn't even notice they were supposed to be sports teams. I wondered why there were so many plural words.
Same complaint. Also, not to poke fun at us too hard but there's probably less sports fans here than the average population :)
Really like the idea though.
For those of you who are put off from trying the game by the category for today’s puzzle being sports, note there are other puzzles from prior days with more general topics.
Click the calendar icon at top of page for the archive.
What the hell is “Planta” though. ;)
These are short little words that are not uncommon even if you are not familiar with sportsball teams. If you struggled unscrambling these words, I'd suggest your vocab is just in dire need of expansion.
It was fun. Couple of suggestions:
- It gave me “TCAAN” which stumped me. Afterwards I pasted it into the Internet Anagram Server, which failed to find any acronyms for it. So I can say with some confidence I don’t think it’s a valid word. Suggest making sure you’re using a dictionary similar to Wordle’s one.
- The game should reveal the solution at the end if the player fails to guess any words.
Came here to say exactly this. I let the timer expire and was expecting to be able to see the answer rather than resort to an anagram solver site...
Catan! (of settling fame)
Ahhh. Proper noun though right? I would suggest excluding proper nouns.
First off, I love the game. Your mom isn't just placating you. It is fun.
Second, I think given all this advice a real clear example can be seen by looking at NYT's Wordle[0]. Instructions are the first thing you see and cover the puzzle. You then click start.
Importantly, the instructions have an example. While the puzzle is extremely intuitive, an example can eliminate almost any ambiguity (intuitive for most people but maybe not kids, non-native English speakers, or just things like someone shoves the game into their friends face. Who knows). There can be a button on the side to show instructions again, which should cover the puzzle and stop the timer.
Personally, I like the timer. The game is simple and clearly meant to be played in a small fast setting, so I think this works. Can also reduce pressure (as well as induce) since someone might think "oh, I got 5 minutes to play" instead of having to "sit down".There's plenty of "thinky games" that have timers: Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are two good examples. Almost any TV game is timed. I don't think there's a problem with this and the pressure can make it fun while also conveying that it won't take a person all day.
Could be good to show solutions. If not, maybe also count "attempts"? IDK[0] https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
> Almost any TV game is timed.
For the benefit of the audience watching, not the player. You wouldn’t want someone consuming the whole show because they do not make a move. There’s little reason to care about time limits on a game someone plays by themselves.
> Personally, I like the timer.
Personally, I hate the timer. It makes me feel stressed. I guessed the first word then decided to stop playing because of the timer.
It's clear while some people appreciate it, many people won't play the game if it has a timer. So, make it optional.
There's a 5 minute timer you can effectively guess all permutations in that time. Ignore the timer. The only real limitation is coming from you.
There needs to be some limit like how wordle limits the number of guesses. The timer is good in that it can put pressure in especially considering how simple the game is. The long length means almost everyone has enough time
A coworker and my wife and I have recently been really enjoying https://bracket.city which is a crossword-clue inspired word game with daily puzzles. It does take a little while to figure out, I'd recommend starting off asking for hints fairly often to decrease frustration, but after a couple weeks my wife and I are on a streak of 3 days of scoring 100.
I thought this was way too hard. I didn't figure out a single word and even failed the tutorial. Seeing everyone loving it makes me feel really stupid.
Thanks for the suggestion, that was really fun. One I've been really enjoying in the same vein is https://raddle.quest
Thanks for that, I just played todays and it is pretty fun!
I find it a bit US centric, like many of these games
I'll quite often wind up solving this by a sort of parallel construction, as in rather than getting the hint I can work out what word is supposed to be there based on what's around it. Some of the clues can be really cryptic.
Yes, that is the real trick when you get stuck is to start constructing the clues that it will eventually become.
Oh we absolutely love bracket city, +1
I’ve showed it to my friends, and it’s stuck. My brother shared it with all of his coworkers and they’re now playing too.
It’s fun watching it “spread” amongst my social group
You've had better luck spreading it than I have it sounds like. Everyone I've mentioned it to has said "It's too hard" and I don't think has really even given it a shot.
Same. I saw a show HN on this a couple weeks ago and have been borderline addicted since.
Neat puzzle.
My first wrong answer was an international spelling issue. It would be nice if it accepted then silently corrected based on equivalent international spellings, but I can also understand why it doesn't, sometimes it might be more crucial to the solution.
There is a "mayor@" e-mail you can use to submit requests like this and the developer has been pretty responsive.
Final score: 4.0 :/
But pretty creative game. Thanks for sharing!
That is probably around where my first score was. :-) My wife and I had a 0 a couple weeks ago.
Is there an option where if you don’t guess a word, it tells you what it was (at least after the timer is up?).
Just worked through a lot of the puzzles. I love the concept, and I also like how the timer doesn't reset when you switch between them.
3 pieces of feedback:
1. Since your time matters, a start button before a new puzzle is presented would be nice.
2. I wanted to play more puzzles but didn't realize the calendar button up top switched puzzles till reading comments. I think fading the screen with an overlay with the existing buttons and adding a "Play Another?" button would hook people in more.
3. Some of the scrambles are too easy. Maybe that's by design, but an example is "PAWSN" in the apr 4th chess puzzle, it's stupidly obvious compared to the other words.
But again really awesome content and would make an amazing mobile website or app.
One small piece of feedback: typically these games do not allow proper nouns, because there’s too many of them. So having “Catan” be a valid word is pretty awful.
Nice game. Tedious to use on a laptop with a trackpad. You should allow keyboard input.
Managing accounts is a huge headache both for yourself and for your users. It's a bunch of code and responsibility for you to manage people's private data securely. It's one more password to manage for your users. You could just use cookies to track daily progress, like catfishing.net does. So what if that doesn't let me have my data available across browsers? It's just a game, tracking progress does not matter that much.
SPOILERS AHEAD
SPOILERS AHEAD
Today's challenge ("Sports Teams") was particularly easy because each one was plural. That made each one "unscramble a 4 letter word" instead of a 5. Might be a consideration for the future.
Check out the big brain on Brad!!
I didn't spot this :-)
Nice UI, but I think someone needs to say it: there's no novel concept here, I've seen the exact same game printed in magazines and on kids' menus. If you're trying to catch people's attention, you need a clever gimmick that they haven't seen before.
Yeah, I don't really get it. Five unrelated anagrams? I was expecting something to happen but it's just the anagrams that I did in a fraction of the time given despite not having a clue what sports those teams play, assuming they exist.
Saw timer, closed tab. Would try it if there's no timer.
A few pieces of feedback from me:
1) Keyboard input would be really nice, especially playing on desktop
2) A "give up" button instead of a 5 minute timeout would be appreciated
3) It might be more fun/challenging if you don't give the category, but have to guess the category after unscrambling the words.
Keyboard is essential; my time was dominated not by the time it took me to solve but the time it took me to click around with my mouse.
I like it, but here's my feedback:
- let me use keyboard input - don't include proper nouns! I did't get catan because I wasn't expecting that - show the answers at the end. Still didn't get catan after, and anagram solvers didn't find it. It was only when I came here that I saw the answer
Quick UI suggestion: Let users playing on desktop type the letters.
I spent several seconds trying to click on the "Build your word here" box to put the cursor there
I agree, today's challenge was really easy. But I did enjoy the other days, I played all of them!
What I'd like is an option to show the answers after failing (not by default, so you can still choose to replay if you want). For instance, I cannot for the life of me get the music act that's associated with "FALMO".
LMFAO?
That was it! I was busy looking for a word rather than an acronym
For anyone interested in word games there's a very fun and free wordle like game I ended up playing daily for the past year, check out https://www.threemagicwords.app/ I'm not the author so this is not a shameless plug, just a good game that is playable on your phone without installing any app.
This is really good. Thanks for mentioning it.
Oh no, that is crazy addicting. I usually don't fall for these types of things, but immediately got hooked on this one.
Seconded. It's somewhat similar to this one as well.
That was fun, thank you! Whatsit Daily Challenge Completed in: 3:28
#1 (1:02) #2 (0:43) #3 (0:29) #4 (0:43) #5 (0:32)
https://www.whatsit.today/
- love the concept, it was unclear at first how to delete a single letter when the button clears the whole word. - I see the comments about a timer but maybe the user can have the option to enable/disable. - Ability to make words more challenging - ability to play previous day games - pop-up instructions for new users - would my mom know what to do when playing for the first time?
What I don't get is whether the mechanics of selecting letters are supposed to be significant. It's pretty odd to click `a b c`, then missclick `a` again and end up with `b c` which means I have to click `b` and `c` only to go for `a b c d` all over again
While the game is ok, there's unfortunately a problem on Firefox on Android.
I know, who cares, only three people in the planet use Firefox on Android. But if you want to know anyway...
The problem is the sizes are not adjusted correctly and so the fixed header/upper part overlaps the scrambled word list, almost completely hiding the first word. You can, through some tricky scrolling, manage to see it and then solve it. But it's tricky. And ugly.
Fwiw, I am one of the other two people with Firefox on Android and am not having this issue, so it might be a question of screen size rather than browser?
The other guy checking in here. No problems with FF on Android for me either
Ok then. I'll assume it's something on my part.
Could be, but I've tried on the same phone on Chrome and it works there.
Very nice! One confusing prompt is “not a valid word” when the word is actually valid, it’s just not the word you are looking for.
Nice job! Pretty fun game.
Only improvement ideas I have are for a smoother start for new players:
1. Let the user start the game themselves so that they have a chance to read the rules without a stressful first impression.
2. Use a different label text than "Build your word here" as it sounds like a drag and drop target rather than an output.
The limiting time factor for me was the clicking around on the page. Allowing keyboard input somehow would be a plus.
On an older iPad I get "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.whatsit.today (see the browser console for more information)." neatly centred on an otherwise blank page.
I think you shouldn't include proper nouns (like there's one in the Apr 6 solution).
Nice work! Would like to see what the correct result would have been for ones I didnt get after the time expires. Keep going!
Just feedback from me: I enjoyed it and found it non frustrating to use. Not sure if I would create an account for it though.
Very nice! On iOS it does not seem to register fast consecutive taps correctly, if that’s fixed I would actually like to play this more often
Same on Android
Cool - it's nearly a subset of Jumble, which I prefer because of the secondary mechanism of solving a pun to guess backwards.
I think it has some potential, but I found today’s puzzle just too easy. I never play for speed, but even if I was, playing on a iPhone, it missed a lot of touches that I only noticed when I was typing a few letters ahead. So I had to come back, erase what I typed and start over. It was annoying already, but if I was playing for speed, it would be a deal breaker.
I’m not much of a puzzler, I like a crossword or a sudoku and that’s all really - but I didn’t understand what I was meant to do?
Edit; oh ok I get it now..
It could be fun but now I know what to do it’s not very challenging. The speed is more determined by the speed I can type that the words. Maybe one letter longer?
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Is this a word game? In all honesty I don't see how it isn't just 5 anagrams with a related theme. I don't know if I'd call that a word game.
It should show instructions the first time, without prompting. I was just confused for a long time.
The icons at the start and end of each row were distracting and confusing.
Addictive. What was third word?
To tell you a brutal truth, I dislike any timed game.
Same! However, I think the OP has done a good job. On mini games like this, I guess it doesn't bother me. I only get frustrated if I have invested time and they throw a timer in. Such a dated mechanic.
Nice! One nit: if playing an archive game (from a previous date), when opening the calendar, would you show not the current month, but the month of the game? This would make it easier to go back to other dates.
Fun game but you should disallow plurals. Overall I’d say use the same word rules as Wordle. Almost all my words were plurals and so were uninteresting, but if that was fixed I would play this!
thanks a lot for the feedback and totally agree
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I like this concept! I've seen other games like https://wordputt.com which try to go semantic instead of categorical.
I made a word game while playing with a few ideas, like anonymous usernames and leaderboards. I still poke at some aspects of it. There’s a rare scoring bug I need to isolate and fix. Anyhow, feel free to look. :)
https://www.gorillasuit.io/
Edit: coming up with a reasonable algorithm for scoring is far more difficult than it looks. I guess most of the word games floating around don't have scoring for a reason.
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It starts the timer before I can understand what it is. So annoying.
I really like it (I play the NYT games daily). The UI is slick.
As others have mentioned categories could probably have broader/non-US content but that's easy. The site/format itself is great.
It's nice but it takes a million clicks to get to another day's puzzle. Tap to close the results page, Tap the toast to show the close button, tap the close button, tap the calendar, tap the day. Maybe some big left and right arrows at the top of the page?
I so hate timers. I left immediately. Sure, have a count up timer for those who what it, but make sure to allow it to be turned off permanently
First of all, great game, just the kind I love. Personally, I love the timer. I can see varying opinions though. Perhaps a toggle for easy mode (no timer) or hard mode (timer, track and beat your own time)
This reminds me a lot of NYT strands, in the sense that it’s “multiple themed rounds of classic word game format X” In the strands example, the base word game is a word search in which they break the rules a bit to make it harder. Here it’s a simple word unscrambling. Makes me wonder what other games you could make by following this “themed rounds of X” format.
I love the game! I hate hate hate the timer though. Other than the timer I'd happily add this to my daily word game routine.
Reminds me of https://www.sporcle.com/
This was super fun and just played the whole back catalogue.
SPOILER BELOW
Took a few games to notice but one minor issue is that in each game the pattern for each row is the same, e.g 3rd row is 2,4,1,3,5. Randomising this would make it better.
Neat! I played a few days :) the only issue I had was that I found it quite easy to tap a previously selected letter, and that’d mess me up especially if it wasn’t the last letter so far in that word. I think it’d probably be better to add a backspace button in addition to the clear one, and not deselect letters by tapping them.
Couple of minor bugs, one of which is arguably not a bug: 1. When you play a game for the first time it invites you to make an account. When you make an account, it seems to forget that you played that particular game already. 2. By manipulating the URL you can play games from the future.
Great idea, like the game. Thanks for making and sharing!
I ended up building a word game last year for the wife and I to play, we kinda forgot about it but this post reminded me (so thanks for that, OP)
Just visited and turns out some people still play!
https://playfreestyle.co/new
> Professional Sports Teams
All American teams, so I got very few of them / care very little about them.
Bit too easy to have repeat value
Pleasant and responsive lightweight design, but the game itself just has no difficulty to it.
Tried four puzzles and all were done in 15 seconds.
So I actually like the timer and potential competitive aspect of it. If you want to lean into that, consider adding leaderboards and percentiles.
For some tips :) https://theunscrambled.com/anagram-solver
I like the calendar where you can go back to play other days. Enhancement request: would be nice for this to have an indicator of which days you have already played.
that's a great point! thanks a lot
Fun! I look forward to seeing what future categories and words are. Do you have to manually curate them each day? How big is your backlog? Is there a way to automate it?
thanks a lot :) yes my friend and I are designing the categories and the words manually with a tiny bit of help from AI tools but you can't fully trust them as they try to sneak in 6 and 4 letter words
I have a Wordle-type clone I'm toying with and getting it to wrangle the correct letters is a harder problem than it seems. Hopefully you're able to streamline your design process so it's as painless as possible!
Whatsit Daily Challenge Completed in: 2:43
#5 (1:18) #3 (0:04) #4 (0:46) #1 (0:27) #2 (0:09)
https://www.whatsit.today/
Whatsit Daily Challenge Completed in: 1:26
#5 (0:46) #2 (0:04) #4 (0:09) #1 (0:21) #3 (0:06)
https://www.whatsit.today/
Well done. 2 observations: when pressing the letters quickly it does not register them properly. I don't understand why the 5 letter limit.
I like it because it scratches my jumble itch.
les circuits de consécration sociale, sera d'autant plus efficace plus la distance sociale de l'objet consacrée - Bourdieu
Cool. I think low hanging fruit to add drag n drop. Some options are libraries like dnd-kit or hello-pangea/dnd.
What professional sports team has the letters 'P', 'R', 'U', 'S', 'S'?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Spurs
Ahhh, thanks!
It was spurs that made me think it was UK centric, lions as well is valid for England too
Someone needs to tell me what word could there be with TCAAN?
What dictionary are you using OP?
edit: IT'S CATAN.
Smh
Would be great to have "Hint" button
Fascinating glimpse into the potential of AI to enhance development velocity. While the current capabilities are impressive, I wonder about the scalability and generalizability to more complex projects. Definitely a space to watch - tools like this could be transformative for developer productivity if limitations can be overcome.
Nice work, especially the minimalistic user interface. It runs fine on my low-powered smartphone, which is good.
Will you open source this by any chance? I'd be curious how it was built!
Less localized words would be better. Sports teams in the U.S. are not that popular outside the U.S.
UI is splendid.
Why is "loins" not a valid word? AFAIK it is.
I am the maintainer of parolottero, another word game (I made it to be used on plasma-mobile) and finding good word lists is not easy at all.
I have a decent one for italian but not for english. Which one are you using?
It's not the name of an americentric sports team, though.
I didn't even notice the category until you said that, and was wondering the same thing.
For mobile a button to clear the row by the word next to each word would be nice.
It’s fun! There is occasionally out of order input on mobile when tapping quickly.
This could be incredible. Kind of like Strands on NY Times but in Wordle format.
Might want to have an international version too?
I don't know US sport teams.
I see - thank you uMatrix - that you use plausible.io
I block all such tracking, so thanks for allowing me to play without that tracking.
I do realise that such blocking affects your stats so if you could devise a way to track without using an external service that would be great.
Whatsit Daily Challenge Completed in: 0:23
#1 (0:05) #2 (0:04) #3 (0:05) #4 (0:04) #5 (0:05)
https://www.whatsit.today/
My favorite part about your game is the A B testing with your mom liking it and not liking it.
Your mom liked the game I played with her too.
Got em.
Could you share how you pick each day's words?
we design them ourselves a bit of a manual process but quite fun
The top hint makes it bit too easy, but I guess if there’s only multiple valid words you need to narrow it down by some prompt
i think this was a bad first puzzle for posting on hn, seemed a bit on the easy side as well, but nice concept
First clue of "Professional Sports Teams" and I noped right out. Sportsball is a pretty big red flag that the content presented is not for me.
there are actually other categories available. Check it out tomorrow and it won't be about sports :D
It seems not to accept a correct answer, "ladel" for Wednesday, March 26, 2025 (minor spoiler, apologies!)
"Ladel" isn't actually in the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ladel
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ladel
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/spellcheck/english?q=la...
OED has it as an incorrect/unusual variant:
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=ladel
It's misspelled constantly on the internet, but "ladle" is the correct spelling.
Ah, fair enough! Thanks
I would prefer if less plurals were used. Every word in my puzzle ended with an 's' as a plural.
As they're the name of US professional sports teams, that's the official name of the teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Hawks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Lions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Spurs
Previous puzzles don't have many plurals, but its the correct choice for this puzzle.
Same
Spurs Hawks Kings Pawns
At first I though I was supposed to make one word using one letter from each row. I think that might be a fun variation, honestly.
Little too easy
Boring and derivative.
Sports teams? Who cares?
I will never understand responses like this.
this is just one of the categories. There are other ones available and tomorrow's one won't be about sports :D
I like it
I like it.
It said LOINS is "not a valid word".
There's no professional sports team (the category for the day) called the 'LOINS'
Oh. Well, I don't like sports of any kind. Except ones with robots. And stone skipping. And maybe indoor bowls if it doesn't get too intense.
You thought there might be a sports team called the Loins?
There should be.
LIONS
Love it!
That was fun
I like it!
"Build your word here" really confused me. I thought that was a text box that I was supposed to activate.
Love it!
25 seconds here
i feel smug
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Stop spamming the thread, sheesh.