wrs 1 day ago

It seems to disallow valid words made with the same letters, which doesn't feel fair. (I don't want to spoil an answer, but -- especially when the word it insists on is arguably French!)

  • jimbob45 1 day ago

    Felt the same way. Failed the last three like that with legitimate words.

  • rokob 1 day ago

    None of those are French words. How many letters is the word you say is French?

    • wrs 12 hours ago

      Four

  • nsvd2 20 hours ago

    It won't let you use the same letters in the same order again (e.g. LEASE -> LEASED). I think that's fair.

    • zbikowski 18 hours ago

      I agree that this would be fair, but it seemingly not true. "SEA" disallows "SEAL" on the next turn (correct answer ALES,) but then you are suddenly allowed to use "SEALED" later - because of my assumption of the rule, I didn't get this stage until the clue. Same with "LEASE" and "LEADERS," which are both allowed to use "LEA."

      So it seems as though the rule is, you must mix up the letters for the following answer, but further answers are fair game to reuse letter combinations (or, it is applied arbitrarily.) Neither are very intuitive IMO.

    • wrs 11 hours ago

      OK yeah, that does sound fine once you say it, but since the only stated rule is “one more letter”, I don’t think it’s obvious enough.

propter_hoc 1 day ago

I tried "KITERS" and "TRIKES" at the 5 letter level, but the app specifically wanted "STRIKE." It kinda demoralized me to have come up with two answers and not be able to proceed, I realized that it wasn't worth trying to guess before the clue came up so I quit out.

  • shshsjsj 1 day ago

    wtf is kiters?

    • luipugs 1 day ago

      kiters = kiteboarders. Welcome to Australia, the country where the words are made up and meanings don't matter.

      • saghm 1 day ago

        All words are made up

        • fjlunky 21 hours ago

          That’s what luipugs said.

          An interesting twist on this game might be that spelling is enforced to be non-standard. Here are letters, here’s the meaning, make the word but it must not be spelt right.

          • saghm 15 hours ago

            No, they said that in Australia words are made up. I'm not disagreeing, but I'm saying that it's not specific to Australia!

            Tangentially, it's funny to me that you happen to use "spelt" here; I've always felt that it doesn't look like a "real" word and choose to use "spelled" instead, but I also recognize that this is entirely my own personal thing and not reflective of anything other than my own issues. It's a great example to me though of how trying to push personal feelings about words against a wider consensus mostly just leads to frustration without any real gains, so it's less frustrating in the long to be able to live with the fact that they won't always match up.

            Language is weird and wonderful and despite often being inconsistent and sometimes outright annoying, it's also extremely powerful, and it works well maybe because of the resiliency it needs to withstand the very real limitations it has, and I choose to embrace it all and enjoy it! (I also suspect is why I enjoy puns way more than average; to quote one of my former coworkers, "words are toys")

    • what 1 day ago

      People flying kites?

  • ryhanshannon 1 day ago

    Same thing here happened with 'irks' and 'risk'

  • iambenm 1 day ago

    Spoiler alert, it seems to be like Wordle in that the same puzzle is given to everyone for that day.

ethanpil 1 day ago

I opened the tab in the background and when i got around to it later somehow i lost the game.... i think you need an official "start" button to prevent this.

  • BrenBarn 1 day ago

    Yeah this happened to me too. A timer with auto-start is a bad combination.

  • paularmstrong 1 day ago

    Also some instructions. I had no idea what I was supposed to do at first.

lost-theory 1 day ago

Pretty fun. But I saw this issue come up on multiple days: Letters were AIERNGT for the final word of day #2. I tried INGRATE. Didn't work. Then I tried TEARING. That worked. But then on the win screen, it said GRANITE. Huh...

coldcache 1 day ago

I really enjoyed this! I do agree with the other comments that a larger vocabulary would be nice. The way some games handle this is by giving bonus points for words that are unintended by the author but are perceived as valid. Or maybe giving extra time? IMO, keep the vocab a bit limited, though (maybe top 30k words or similar).

mmclar 20 hours ago

Please don't give me a hint if I didn't ask for it! Maybe make a hint button that becomes enabled at a certain time.

thrtythreeforty 1 day ago

It reminds me of Wordflower. I like this! With one caveat:

The word games that have been posted in the last few days feature a timer component, and it's game over when you miss the timer. I think they'd be more rewarding if it weren't sudden death. Instead it should just let you play through and give you a score out of 5. Especially if it is going to pick obscure words (as another commenter says - arguably one word isn't English and that feels like a bad reason to "lose").

  • thrtythreeforty 1 day ago

    More feedback:

    - I was intently staring at letters and didn't notice you get a definition as a hint! Maybe the hint UI needs a tweak.

    - it needs to allow permutations that are also words, or at least provide an additional reward for finding those (maybe an extra half point).

    - there should be a "clear" button next to shuffle.

    - there should be a "pause" button which hides everything and stops the timer. My waitress came by as I was playing and I lost.

    • invictati 1 day ago

      It's pretty clear that they're leaving the time limit in because it attracts engagement in the form of comments like yours.

nmenon10 1 day ago

I liked playing the game! A few things that worked well for me - a gradual ladder meant I knew word length was going to increase by 1 and was prepared mentally, the timer was not in my face distracting me as I tried thinking, the clue comes around the 25s mark to help me get unstuck. What didn't work for me was valid words not being accepted, leaving you a little demoralized. I see a lot of suggestions already around this and I don't have anything more specific to add to that.

But overall, this was fun!

jayzer01 1 day ago

It's a good game. A little easier than wordle because you can go back and forth with variations on a few words by adding s and ed. Maybe a harder variant could be you go to the next level with a new set of letters still adding one more. Another variant could be you have to solve like a stack of them, so like you have 5 of these then to get to the next level all 5 have to progress, each with a different pool of letters.

RickS 1 day ago

Really rewarding keyboard UX on this. Typing felt great. I couldn't figure out how to shuffle or give up via the keyboard. Shuffle with escape would make sense.

  • jihadjihad 1 day ago

    I’d vote shuffle with space bar.

scubbo 1 day ago

I guess I'll check back later and try to remember that I can't have the tab open in the background? :)

EDIT: OK, I found the previous puzzles link. Cute! Though I got a bug on the second one - (ROT13 for spoilers) apparently the answer was "tenavgr" but I put in "grnevat" and it still accepted it (but other prompts had not accepted alternate-but-valid words)

takencoder 12 hours ago

This is a fantastic little word game. The staggered entry animation and the typing UX are incredibly polished.

damienmeur 18 hours ago

Very cool, little improvements: the hint I got contained the ethymological "root" of the word to find. Might be better to make the hint never leak too much on the word itself

dash2 1 day ago

A game rather like this is described in Gwen Raverat’s Edwardian memoir, Period Piece. There you have to keep finding new words one letter longer, and they get ridiculous combos like TRUMPET, STRUMPET, (thou) TRUMPETST, STRUMPETST…

hmate9 22 hours ago

Thank you guys for the feedback. I'll fix valid words being rejected, having space as a keyboard shortcut for shuffle, and maybe a "zen" mode without a timer.

jadenzaleski 1 day ago

Unlike everyone else here, I enjoyed this. A good hit for the day, see you tmrw

jameswhitford 22 hours ago

Awesome game! A potential UX update: if you fail a guess, the letters go back down below in the same configuration as your guess.

But others might disagree!

AlexSmith26 1 day ago

Funny. I type and pass two words. When I see S E E A L, I can't find the right combination. So what's the purpose of this web?

gfat 1 day ago

The staggered entry animation of the letters on page load is lovely. The typing also felt rewarding.

Bit of feedback, should the timer pause when reading the how to play or opening settings?

konsalexee 1 day ago

Super fun game! When are you gonna sell this to NYT games to play alongside with world daily? lol

elsig60 11 hours ago

Interesting. how did you build it?

baking 1 day ago

All I get is this: "Today's run is over."

museshare 1 day ago

This is a spiritual descendant of Wordle, cool idea!

ryanisnan 1 day ago

Fun, but I don't like trivia.

BrenBarn 1 day ago

Fun! As others mentioned, it's unclear why certain words are rejected. Without clues, there's no reason the player would know which of several anagrams is the "right" one. Seems like it'd be better to accept any valid word, or perhaps have some kind of bonus for finding all of them.

jagged-chisel 1 day ago

"Today's run is over"

I hate games of this kind. "You failed. Try again tomorrow." I won't be back. It wasn't enough fun to remember. And I'm not likely to upvote because of these reasons (so it won't appear in my 'upvoted submissions')

  • joshuat 1 day ago

    Coupled with the immediate timer start, no instructions. Meh.

  • ventana 1 day ago

    My reaction too, but then I found the button to try the previous days, and it was enough for me to figure out the game :)

d--b 1 day ago

It’s annoying that DEALERS doesnt work when the answer is LEADERS