Show HN: I made a simple daily word puzzle
triword.net
triword.net
Currently
https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
https://games.oec.world/en/tradle/
https://www.namethatnation.com/
https://triword.net/ <--- the new one
https://squaredle.app/ (you can also just type if you find swiping annoying)
Some sort of progress would be nice, even if it's just a list of past guesses. Perhaps do what Wordle does - show if guessed letters are in the right place or present in the answer.
With regards to lifelines - allow selecting which letter to reveal. Because in today's puzzle case it's obvious that it's --A, so "reveal the last letter" lifeline is basically useless.
As for the letter lifeline, I am curious how you decided that the third letter's identity is obvious. There are plenty of words that end in ISS, IZE, and ILL, not to mention OSS, OZE, and OLL (e.g. SCROLL, EXTOLL). There is also USS, UZE, and ULL, (e.g. GAUZE, TRUSS, BULL, although they don't fit.)
I was almost turned off of Connections by the poor instructions.
The instructions say that categories 'will always be more specific than "5-LETTER WORDS," "NAMES" or "VERBS"'.
Then one of the first puzzles I did had "PRONOUNS" as a category! That did not make a good first impression.
The interface also probably turns off some people who would otherwise enjoy it. It would be greatly improved if they replaced the "Shuffle" with letting you re-arrange the words by dragging them.
I think there's only about 120 or so pronouns, so having this as a category isn't as unreasonable as it first seems.
I still play Connections, and I do what was written up as "hard mode" in the NYT today: try to enter the matching quadruplets in reverser order, starting with purple.
When the player guesses three letters, e.g. if they guess BRA, they're implicitly asking whether the answer is BRASS/ZEBRA/?????. For each of those words, there are several ways their guess can be "wrong": (1) The guess doesn't fit this clue at all: none of BRALL, LBRAL, LLBRA is a word. (2) The guess fits this clue, but its placement is wrong: ZEBRA is a word, but we're actually expecting ___ZE, not ZE___. (3) The guess fits this clue, but it's not the expected word: BRASS is a word, but only the A is in the right place to match the underlying expected word. ZEBRA is a word, but none of the letters are a match.
You should surface some of that new information to the player. You could do that Wordle-style by just surfacing it automatically with no further interaction; or, since there are sometimes different kinds of new information, you could let the player interactively choose what kind of new information they'd like to see as a reward for their guess: See which letters are right? See which placements are right? And so on. And, since there are three clues in play at once, maybe you allow the player to get new information from only one clue per guess.
Concretely: The clues are SS/ZE/LL. The player guesses BRA. You fill in "BRASS" and "ZEBRA" in yellow and "BRALL" in red. Tools appear to the right of BRASS — "Check placement" and "Check letters" — and also to the right of ZEBRA. The player clicks "Check placement" on ZEBRA and gets a negative response (which is recorded visibly somehow). A new prompt appears. The player guesses PAR. You fill in "SPARS" in yellow, PARZE and PARLL in red. Tools appear to the right of SPARS. The player clicks "Check letters" and the A turns green, indicating that the first word has an A in the third position. (Maybe the second S also turns green, and the first S turns yellow — Wordle rules. But that feels redundant with "Check placement.") Alternatively, the A turns yellow, indicating that there's an A somewhere in the correct three-letter answer; and the P and R are grayed out on the keyboard. A new prompt appears... And so on.
This kind of progression would make the game much more engaging!
If there is any kind of progression, I could imagine it just being successive hints:
- One random letter, but no information about placement - The correct placement of the random letter in the affix - The correct placement of the affix to the stems
But really, I think the simplicity of this as a pure logic puzzle is great all on its own.
If I have my three letters, then I can easily see for myself whether or not my guess is correct just by looking at the screen; the input field does not help me at all.
Perhaps choose a different design if you don't want people to associate affordances from that game with this.
2/19/2024: (spoiler) one alternative solution is 'BRA' [0], but that's not accepted.
Out of curiosity though, do you ensure there is only one solution for each challenge?
It would happen if I picked generic clues like BR/SL/ER (not a real puzzle, don't try to solve it), but I make a point not to. As long as you pick clues that are a little more specific than that, it's actually extremely improbable, despite what you would intuitively think (I had the same thought in the beginning!). Remember that there are 4 restraints, not 3 - it has to match 3 different prefixes or suffixes, but it also has to only be 3 letters (4 letters on weekends).
Sometimes I'm suspicious and I do verify them, but it's really only a risk with the compound word versions like SELL/LAW/FOX. Those I have to be more careful with.
Brall isn't an obscure word, it's an obsolete one. I think it's fair to say that if your word isn't in Oxford or American Heritage, you shouldn't expect it to be in the result set.
It feels as if you hit "BRASS" and "ZEBRA" then couldn't make it fit with "LL", then searched for "brall" hoping to have a hit.
But if you used WinAMP back in the day, you'd have whipped this one in the ass.
If on the other hand I set it to accept the alternate obscure solutions, that actually could ruin the puzzle in my opinion.
Take today's with BRA for example - it's a nigh-certainty that the commenter suggesting BRA did not know the archaic alternate spelling of BRAWL. What's much more likely is that they saw "BRASS", then checked ZE and saw "ZEBRA", and then thought "I wonder if BRALL is a word?" and googled it to find that it was indeed a word in a very obscure sense.
Check this google n-gram for a reference of just how obscure that word is - it hasn't registered meaningfully anytime in several centuries. I added in the word "quine," another obscure word, just for comparison, and you can see it's orders of magnitude less common even than that. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brall%2Cbrawl%...
So what would start happening is people would find something that worked for 2 of 3 (which is easy), type it in cuz why not it might work, have it succeed because the 3rd option was written once by a Gregorian monk in a remote monastery in the Balkan Mountains, and be like "huh, well that's dumb." It's actually a lose-lose that would let people off easier because they'd feel like it was done just because they found something that matched 2 of 3 and happened to match the 3rd in a fairly ridiculous way.
Edit: I came up with a solution to this. I'll verify each puzzle against a full dictionary with obscure words included, and if a user puts in a valid obscure solution I'll display a message saying "Valid, but at least one of these words is too obscure. A better solution exists." It'll take a little time to add that functionality though.
Each puzzle has only one solution, so if you find one that doesn't work with 1 or more extremely uncommon words, it's safe to assume that's not the solution.
Maybe I should add a reveal option for when someone feels done with it.
so i reloaded several times to remove each letter that wasn't there every time... well it looks like there is only the M left and yet the the answer is not MMA
Sorry about that though. For now, if you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.
Cow, Flower, Hop: The answer is "bell" (cowbell, bellflower, bellhop)
You can ratchet up the difficulty by allowing homophones or proper nouns, for example: Tall, Spin, Fox...
My brother and I use to make them up and play each other on long car rides during summer vacations.