I really like the execution on this. One piece of feedback is that the timer gave me anxiety and I closed it. I do puzzles to phase out from stress not to challenge myself in a time bound environment
I’d also enjoy some form of global leaderboard of some sort (maybe a scatterplot comparing time and accuracy?), so I can assess how inferior/superior I am to others.
There is also the age-old argument about British-English vs American English e.g. Armor is not spelled that way in British English so it takes a lot more effort to work these out.
Pretty slick though.
- there's a timer
- solutions are not always unique
Often in Wordle, you'll have three or four green letters, which leaves several possible answers, and you just have to guess which one is correct. Some days you'll be lucky, some days you won't! But it feels OK because you're not working against a clock; so you have time to mull over the possibilities and decide which one feels better.
In Three Magic words, because you're racing against the clock, once you see a solution you immediately want to put it in. But sometimes it gets rejected! For example, on Tuesday's puzzle:
Gur pbeerpg fbyhgvba jnf CRRYF naq OHYXL, ohg V gevrq CRRXF naq OHYYL juvpu V guvax jbhyq nyfb unir orra inyvq.
Somehow that feels more unfair than the Wordle case. I wonder if it might be better just to accept any valid solution that uses known common words?
I think that solution lock you experience - it's a little uncomfortable, but once you learn to wriggle your way out of it, you get that "aha" feeling I'm going for.
> I think that solution lock you experience - it's a little uncomfortable, but once you learn to wriggle your way out of it, you get that "aha" feeling I'm going for.
This is the part that gives me the "ugh" experience.
If you really want something to formulate a score, count the number of guesses.
If you just show the number of stars the player got at the end without emphasizing what they missed, those who are playing for speed are rewarded with more stars, those who are playing for low guesses are rewarded for a low number.