Show HN: 18 Words

Thanks everyone for the feedback! Two questions

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?

    eg.: 10s solution gives x3 score 
         30s = 1 score (1x1)
         40s = 0.75
         60s 0.5

The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and I’m not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. I’ve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game.

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.

Would be nice to have a ‘scramble!’ button so it makes it slightly easier when we get stuck

I like the idea, but I didn't like losing after a few words. Now it might just be me not being good at losing, but who is?

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

https://wordnerd.co/23words/ is similar (but 23 words instead of 18).

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.

BUG:

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"

Update:

The game amazingly had 132,411 players yesterday and received tons of player feedback. After a long night talking with players and play testing I’ve shipped the following changes:

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1. I’ve kept the 30 second timer but you now continue through the whole 18 words to get a final score of x/18.

2. I’ve added a new share feature to better show your result in a similar Wordle style.

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Thanks again for all the feedback and for checking out the game!

I think there is probably a research paper hiding inside this game.

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.

I'd appreciate a 'shuffle' button that just re-mixed-up the letters into a different order. I find this keeps me from obsessing on adjacent letter pairs that my eyes/brain lock onto.

I got the word BAITH on like turn 5, and I only chose that because I couldn't figure anything out. I thought it was a nonsense word. But mixing in a scottish slang word in the easy section was a surprise.

I would suggest instead of a countdown timer, use time as a score (less time used = higher score) so at least the player can advance. Also it’s no fun and extremely annoying to make the player wait 12 hours for the next challenge, which turns me off to even wanting to play again.

Don’t reset to 30s for each word. Just add 30s (or 20s). So if I am fast in the early rounds, I am rewarded in later rounds by having 1:43 to work on a word I am completely stuck on.

Pretty frustrating when you find a word, but it's not THE word. Pretty fun otherwise.

I can understand the clock running out meaning a loss - but I still want to play the rest of the words? how do I do that? I don't think they are accessible anymore

I loved it, i hated it. I'm so bad at this.

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).

I didn't realise at first that you could choose letters which weren't adjacent which made it very hard! Guess I've been playing too much https://zanagrams.com/ (which was also posted here recently).

This is great. The speed aspect reminds me of the old AOL chatroom word scramble games. I personally love the timer, but I also do the newspaper anagrams without a pen, so I'm certain to be out of the majority on this.

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.

Fun game though I wish it left more time for the longer words, also wish we could have the letters in one line and shuffle them

Loved it. I would change the timer from text (which I'm constantly reading as it changes) to a progress bar or set of dots which don't require thinking. Also I would use 3 strikes instead of one you're out, because a single miss isn't really representative. (similarly, any valid word should work.) Letter display order can offer clues but seems random. Perhaps vowels on top row, then consonants on bottom, in alphabetic order? Would love a hard mode for multi-lingual (latin-text) speakers to use multiple languages.

Some kinds of brains must just not be good at this kind of game.

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?

Other stats you could show:

- average time to correct answer - correct percentage

I think you should leave it hard like this. Make people earn that perfect score. Maybe add a dedicated clear button. Others have mentioned shuffle but I think you should leave as is, it's more challenging. Awesome stuff I'm going to send this to my mom she will be addicted.

Was this by chance inspired by a previous submission (now defunct) that had a similar premise?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536488

Edit: I believe it was transferred to a new domain at https://wordnerd.co/

  function getPercentileText(survived) {
      if (survived === 18) return 'Top 1% of players today ';
      if (survived === 17) return 'Top 2% of players today ';
      if (survived === 16) return 'Top 3% of players today ';
      if (survived === 15) return 'Top 5% of players today ';
      if (survived >= 12 && survived <= 14) return 'Top 10% of players today ';
      if (survived >= 10 && survived <= 11) return 'Top 20% of players today ';
      if (survived >= 8 && survived <= 9) return 'Top 50% of players today ';
      return 'No trophy earned today ';
  }

I feel like I've been lied to!

I expected the game to restart when I lost the word, but when it continued it piqued my interest to continue playing.

It can get bit tedious as one progresses, you need to push yourself to continue. Not sure what can be done to motivate yourself to continue. But I did enjoy since it didn’t make me restart if I lose a round.

Nice! I think a big part of the success-to-fail-ratio is Subitizing.

Interestingly, whenever I failed, the correct answer felt totally obvious - and I wonder how this observation relates to frame semantics theory?

And not being native english speaker (as you, reading my comment, may have noticed) makes this harder, but still an exciting game.

Very fun and I loved the UI. Just wish I could have played the rest of the words ("photo" got me out)

I thought it was excellent. I was happy with the timer but found that I could either get a word almost immediately or not at all. Would it be possible to 'skip' ones you get stuck on? Then they are given back to you at the end or you can click on the squares to finish them (different colour for skipped) at any point? How about a letter shuffle feature? Game itself was very slick. I got 13 btw...

Love the timer, that's the killer feature.

I would add a leaderboard, and then from the second word on, as you keep guessing something like "better than 10% of users", to keep me motivated.

I also wonder if you add different languages, for me it wasn't that easy in English.

I think loading the big wordlist (279496 words as of now) is a waste of bandwidth as you only need to load permutations of the words in the selected challenge (e.g. you don't need "ABANDONEES" if you don't have a word with those letters).

Hi Pompomsheep!

I just wanted to say—you’ve made a seriously addictive game! Congrats!

I was wondering if you’d be interested in bringing it to CrazyGames (www.crazygames.com). We’d love to help you reach a bigger audience and monetize your awesome game.

If that sounds interesting, feel free to send me an email at nahee@crazygames.com. I’d love to chat!

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Suggestion: Require a user to hit ENTER or SPACE to clear the word, even if it's a wrong word. Being able to see the letters laid linearly is useful to solving. Automated clearing of wrong words is unhelpful.

This was harder than I thought it would be. It's pretty fun to play! May I suggest displaying the final result and/or ongoing progress as 18 circles/shapes that fill up depending on how far you made it?

I didn’t realize the word “crowd“ only had one vowel until I saw it scrambled!

I would like a reset button for when I see I’m going wrong after a few letters. The timer could continue to countdown but it would be faster to click reset rather than unclicking each letter

Something about not being able to shuffle the tiles makes this hard for me.

Got to 13 before blanking on what turned out to be a pretty obvious word. Personally, I think the timer mechanic that would work best here might be a running bank rather than a per-word reset. Start with X seconds, and when you solve a word add back N seconds scaled to word length. Fast solves on easy words give you buffer for the hard ones. Keeps the pressure without the "lose a potential perfect score on one brain-freeze" frustration.

Wow I suck! Played today's and a few others, and got ~4-6/18. I like the timer.

For 4 letters it's enough time to guess, but I have no idea what they mean: 'Doby', 'Etas'

This game helped me realise I'm a doofus 10/10