1. For a version without the timer what would you like to happen if you are just completely stuck on a word? Hints to reveal letters or skip the word?
2. For those who like the timed version would you prefer to continue when you miss a word and then get a final score out of 18?
With the countdown, you more want to care about the high level stuff: Keep your brain agile enough to get the next one, figure out more general patterns, ensure you "cover" the promising patterns, notice tough spots (with tons of patterns) where you you'll need to lock in. That stuff is more fun to focus on than speed.
Everyone wants to fail less, sure. It's not surprising people's feedback focuses on the mechanic that made you fail! That doesn't mean changing that bit will make the game more fun.
The timer doesn’t have to be visible at all until the end.
> Everyone wants to fail less, sure.
It has nothing to do with not wanting to fail. Sometimes people just want to chill a bit or kill a few minutes with a simple word puzzle that engages your game without being stressful. This game doesn’t even let you repeat the challenges you took, so to play it you always have to be highly engaged. That’s fine for some games, but not every game needs to be like that, and this one doesn’t.
No one’s asking timer mode to go away, or even become the default, just to have the alternative option.
But I'd like to propose allowing keyboard input. Losing because of your mouse skills in a pattern recognition game is annoying.
Anyway, doesn't matter, it was totally my mistake, everything works for me as well as for everyone else.
As for the second, that's more suggestive and I don't care as much either way. Personally me for me I've just been going down the archive trying each day. I enjoy competitive games, so once I miss a word I don't have much interest in continuing on.
You click next and it goes to the next word.
I don’t want hints but I can see how others might want that. But you still don’t get credit for hints. Or it shows “x hints used”
Final score can show that you got the first N words in <30s (as it is now), and you can have other stats:
* Total number of consecutive words (even if over time)
* Total number of words
* total words <30 seconds
* Plus whatever hint based metrics you want
Perhaps it is intentionally part of the design, but being a bit of a perfectionist, I failed a couple of times, and found that actually the longer words were (often) easier than the shorter ones...
a) the timer would be cumulative, so that solving the early words faster gives more time for the harder words,
b) going negative wouldn't end the game, it would just turn the time red or something, with the goal being to finish all of the words with the highest time-remaining possible, rather than just to win/lose.
2. add a multiplier depending on the number of seconds until solved. [30s / [taken]s = score
eg.: 10s solution gives x3 score
30s = 1 score (1x1)
40s = 0.75
60s 0.5
Maybe a few different modes? How many can you get out of 18, how long can you last (unlimited), and just a chilled relaxed mode.
Fun game, thanks for sharing!
Absolutely, I had to reopen it a bunch of times in incognito to make it to the end xD
Very fun!
Some suggestions people have made around being able to shuffle or place letters - maybe. But the game is pretty perfect as it is.
2. Yes being able to continue would be great, it's frustrating that the game just stops.
Great work anyway!
2. Yes
3. I got stuck and couldn't get past RILGUN -- it'd be nice to know what the word you were going for actually was.
i think there is only two valid words: luring and ruling.
I am with the people asking for a scramble/ shuffle button. I have to do anagrams all the time in cryptic crosswords and sometimes it requires seeing things in a totally different order to unlock the answer.
2. I don't have a preference.
Very cool and well done.
"Baith" is incredibly esoteric.
Also a version in which your unused time is accumulated for future rounds would be interesting
That would also let you scale to any arbitrary word length.
Adding a second for each letter you type is a crude version.
If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Relax Mode vs. Challenge Mode.
By the way: I really like the overall design of Zanagrams and 18 Words. These are small puzzle games with very simple, clean UIs. They work crisply and I've noticed you've been tidying up Zanagrams, adding minor features and settings. They have a very Classic Web feel to them. It's not like you're trying to get me to watch ads or subscribe to your newsletter or are just breadcrumbs to some for-profit thing. I like having a handful of very easy to pick up puzzles/toys when I need to fidget. They help keep me away from TikToks and Shorts.
Thus, he always includes a relaxed mode to let someone practice without any stress. Incidentally, he realized that some people only ever play in the relaxed mode!
Maybe if it counted up I would be less annoyed by it. I like how the NYT does it with their crossword app. If you complete it under some threshold you get a gold star but there's no upper limit on the time.
I much prefer this way, personally at least.
Or alternatively every word still has the timer and then at the end if you finish, it tells you how many words you completed under the timer and gives you a score based on that.
And then maybe an option for those who don't want the timer to show at all, since maybe it adds a bit of pressure. You can have just a simple option that removes the timer entirely from view
In one sense I really enjoy the timer up to the point that I lose, but it feels very unsatisfactory, especially if I lose early, & I'm acutely aware the difficulty level it's set at will be experienced radically differently by different players (to the exclusion of most I would imagine).
Having a timerless mode is very much needed as an option - there's no real risk of "cheating" with these cookie-based browser games anyway since I could just have infinite retries in a private tab if I felt like doing that.
PS anyone have any other fun, simple games like this and Zanagrams? I found https://maptap.gg/ recently and that also gives me the same Classic Web feeling that OP mentioned.
But if this game was called “Do A Word Puzzle While Being Distracted By Animated Numbers in Your Peripheral Vision”, that would be alright.
While I agree that for some people games with a time limit are not fun, I don't think the challenges and difficulty should be classified as "purposeless" and "dumb". For many the challenge/difficulty IS the fun part, and they serve a genuine purpose. If you don't like that, then play a different game, but that doesn't mean the game you don't like is useless.
Tangentially, I have noticed some of the most well-balanced difficult games I have ever played were the ones with very granular difficulty settings. Examples include CrossCode and Celeste. Crypt of the Necrodancer too, though the customisation there feels like it crosses into too granular. In each I changed the difficulty settings exactly once, for optional challenges, and it made the games way more enjoyable.
BUT i'd like it if each round started with letters hidden and timer paused in case i need to step away and redirect my attention to something else.
I regularly do cryptic crosswords (so this sort of game is in my wheelhouse). My goal is to complete the puzzle, not do so in a particular time. Completing it is often hard (depending on which paper I've picked up). There is no timer when I'm say with paper and pen, so it baffles me that every online newspaper cryptic has a timer on by default, and in some cases it can't be disabled.
It's also the thing that "ruined" the LinkedIn puzzles for me. They're generally fun puzzles, but timing it against my PB or - worse - people I'm connected to on LinkedIn just wrecks the experience. I opted out of leaderboards, because I don't really want to know a guy I worked with years ago trashes me at Queens every morning.
Strong agreement that a "relax" mode is needed here - at longer word lengths its becoming a test of recall and anagram ability, and that's fun in its own right. The timer just makes it a bit "meh", and I won't be returning as a result. Shame.
Or maybe don’t even keep score. That’s one of the features which makes be skip these daily games. Not every game needs to be a competition!
The ones I get stuck on are so obvious once the word is revealed that just a reshuffle of the letters would help.
Maybe give the player 3 chances to re-scramble the letters.
I guessed "LATER", but it said - wrong and mentioned "ALERT". The only fix I would make is to ensure that all possible words with scrambled characters make sense.
LATER and ALERT are both correct, for text "A E R T L"
Oh it was supposed to be Habit…
Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got:
|X|o|X|X|X|o|o|o|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|o|X| 13/18
I couldn't guess Dice because, as an ESL person, I couldn't make the D-i combo sound like /d/+ /aɪ/ in my head (it sounded as /d/ + /ɪ/), so a part of my neural circuitry didn't fire, and I couldn't complete it with `ce.`
In other words I, personally, in this pattern recognition game rely on the way words sounds in my head to find familiar combinations and continue the sequence.
Possibly the biggest difference is that 23 Words continues with the next word if you fail to get a word within 30 seconds. When you have attempted all 23 words it will present you with results like this.
You found 21/23 words
Top 7% of players today.serious question: if the majority aren't "in the know" and some minority is, and the game has literally nothing to do with sending any sekrut messages, who cares? like, is a white nationalist sitting here on HN, playing this game over a coffee and thinks, "heh, sick this is 4 numbers away from the callsign"
(I’m not saying the game needs to change its name.)
I do have another version where it accepts ANY word but I found it quite unsatisfying when I survived by randomly spamming combinations and finding a really obscure word.
So am currently running it against a 20,000 word wordlist instead of my larger 300,000 wordlist
Granted, there are also people who get annoyed when the game seems too accepting of unusual words, but if you can point them to a valid dictionary definition for that oddball word, they usually accept it without argument.
Definitely not any less valid or unsatisfying than "zebra".
Given that those two don’t have the same letters, isn’t that the expected outcome?
EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.
I think summarizing everybody's feedback the simplest solution is: "Game difficulty".
- Standard: what you have today
- Relaxed: 1 minute per word?
- Practice Mode: no timer whatsoever
And "Practice Mode" is a completely different mode that lets you skip questions, and instead of "you win / you lose" which is today's behavior, you end up with a score (14/18).
A shuffle button would be nice (especially if it's keyboard friendly). I've found it useful for me with the NYT Spelling Bee. Sometimes my brain just gets stuck on a letter combination because two letters are close together, and the rearrangement helps.
It would be kind of fun to have an endless mode too, that just pulls words from the dictionary. Maybe not quite in line with the "daily word game" premise, but something I would personally find enjoyable.
https://www.uptoplay.net/wordiest-online-game/com.concretero...
Very similar in spirit, but IMHO a lot more enjoyable than your version. It's untimed which takes the pressure off, but still a challenge because there are multiple potentially correct answers.
The on-line version doesn't seem to be working, and I don't have an android device so I can't tell if the app is still working either. But I ran this on my nexus 7 for years until it died. It was one of my favorite on-line games. I would happily pay someone to port it to ios.
I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.
Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?
A re-scramble button would do wonders for me like in that Spelling Bee game on NYTimes.
The only thing I really don't like, is that each puzzle can only be played once. I would like to figure out all words of a day even if it doesn't count.
This could even be an interesting statistic, how many people finished all words ignoring the time component.
It’s coming along nicely btw, some people are saying they don’t like the timer but I personally think the timer adds a lot to it. Also only being able to attempt once makes it more competitive, like if you combined hardcore minecraft and wordle. Hardcore wordle.
Forgive the shameless plug. Here is my word game which only features words from programming and compsci.
For 4 letters it's enough time to guess, but I have no idea what they mean: 'Doby', 'Etas'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536488
Edit: I believe it was transferred to a new domain at https://wordnerd.co/
The UI is almost perfect, it’s seamless on mobile and desktop.
I made some criticism in other comments therefore I also wanted to make a comment saying what I liked.
I'm load a short wordlist first and then the longer version async so it doesn't really affect how long until you can start playing.
Waste of bandwidth is true. Cloudflare pages hates me
Love the pressure due to the timer, and the best aid to help is say it aloud.
I find that with things like this my distribution of times is extremely uneven: I get most words in a few seconds, but every now and then one comes along that for whatever reason my brain doesn't want to see and then it takes much longer. (And if that "much longer" is over the 30-second limit, too bad, I lose.)
And something about this makes playing with the timer annoying for me: I feel some combination of "surely I should get some credit for getting all those others so much quicker than the timer allows" and "oh, come on, that was just unlucky and doesn't reflect what I can generally do".
(I am not claiming that it's right to feel anything like that. Just that I do and I suspect I'm not alone.)
I wonder about a mechanic like this: the timer starts at 30 seconds; when you solve a word, rather than resetting to 30 seconds the timer increments by 10 seconds. So if you're solving in <10s on average then (at least after the first few, easier, words) you can afford to have the occasional brain failure without getting thrown out of the game. And your overall performance depends on how well you do on all the words, not how you do on the single worst one.
(I agree with others that there should also be a no-timer mode for those who just don't want to feel tested and/or stressed in that way.)
Congrats! This looks like a daily one for me
Good job, I got 15/18
way easier with fingers on the keyboard (vs selecting characters with mouse)
just typing out seemingly possible words per muscle memory / subconscious impulse
The internet is a magical place.
I got stuck on the word corner of all words. Ugh
I'm normally terrible at anagrams.
Enjoying time-based games must be some prey animal adaptation, y'all are probably vegan and have negative canthal tilt.