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Comment by klbarry | Hacker News Reader

I made up a word game in high school that became popular with my friends - tell me what you think. Basically, you solve for one word. The clues are words that have at least one letter from the word, in order, that have something to do with the word.

As an example, this:

---

storm

weather

drip

falling

---

would be "rain".

This one is considerably harder:

---

fur

hibernate

claws

latin

brown

omnivores

---

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Interesting game. I admit, I wouldn't have gotten it without help from the internet, which I suppose is against the rules. But I know no latin, so it was my only hope. The answer is ursine, which I've attempted to bury somewhat in my response so that it doesn't pop out so obviously to those who read this later and want to solve the clues for themselves.

Here's a stab at one that's so vague that there's probably a better answer hidden in there than the intended "right" one:

Carbohydrates

Chickpea

Canned

Confectionary

I cheated with grep:

grep "^[fur][hibernate][claws][latin][brown][omnivores]$" /usr/share/dict/words

for yours, bean, chef, diet, dine

These are just words so my answer also doesn't pop-out. I believe the answer is bean. Although I don't know the meaning of confectionery.

Damn, I knew it had to start with urs, but I couldn't figure out the rest. Regardless, I like the game.

turn this into an app!

I'm not tech savvy enough to make an app, but I will devote part of my website to it, at some point.

Team up with someone who wants to make it an app, then!

It's natural for a touch interface: each word made up of scrabble-like tiles with a letter on each, tap the letter(s) from each word that spell out the answer and submit for a score. Or, if you wanted to get crazy, you could play heads-up, but you'd need a whole lot of clues/answers lined up if you wanted to go that route (so if you wanted to go really crazy, string together some databases and programs to auto-generate each puzzle).

Seriously! I think you could do plenty fine with an app of this sort!

feline

Except cats don't hibernate. Hint: it's an adjective, like feline, except descriptive of a different species of animal.

Ah, I was bitten by not being a native-speaker. I've interpreted "hibernate" as the same thing my laptop does, when it hibernates. And cats do that all the time, right? ;-)

Cats sleep, buts I don't think they hibernate, do they? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation

bear?

and you didn't read the rules

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