23words.com | Hacker News Reader

23words.com

307 pointspuzzledpenguin83 comments

I like quick low-stakes browser games like this, something fun and fast to wake up your brain with morning coffee. If interested, here are some others I've come across -

Linxicon - build bridges between two words (https://linxicon.com)

WhenTaken - use clues to guess where and when a photo was taken (https://whentaken.com)

Angle - guess the exact arc angle (https://angle.wtf)

Metazooa - deduce the animal species (https://metazooa.com)

Tradle - guess the country by its exports (https://games.oec.world/en/tradle)

Globle - find the country by proximity (https://globle-game.com)

I'd like to add:

Betweenle - Guess the secret word between two words (https://betweenle.com/)

I'm loving this one! Thanks for sharing :)

I've been compiling a bunch of daily games over the past 4 months at https://dles.aukspot.com with all these games and about 200 more, if you're interested!

This one could be a good addition.

Oh! I love a good list! Esp something like geo which is a skill that keeps fading the less I use it.

I do too! This is my first curated list I've shared with others, and I'm really happy I did. If you want a great geography game, GeoGrid is my favorite, but I also love the ones that sort of mimic GeoGuessr with guessing the location based on pictures or satellite images.

Shameless self-promotion:

https://wordmax.game

Released for public preview just today.

Game play similar to Scrabble, but played "duplicate" style.

Admittedly not exactly "quick low-stakes".

Shameless plug:

Logiquiz - Self Referential Logic Puzzle (https://www.logiquiz.com/)

Zebra Puzzles - Daily Zebra Puzzles (https://www.zebrapuzzles.com/)

Zebra puzzles could use a pencil feature and also column labels

FoodGuessr - guess the country of origin for some dish (https://www.foodguessr.com/)

That's a good way to start regional wars.

You could also try

Chrono - arrange historical events in chronological order (https://chrono.quest)

If we're doing self promotion, I'll mention a game I made based on Levenshtein's distance, https://wordistance.com --

(hints enabled by default, but the real game is without them!)

+1 for Metazooa. It's one of my favorites in my daily line up. They also have the (IMO much harder) MetaFlora for plants (https://flora.metazooa.com/)

Also on my list:

- Hashtag wordle (https://everydaypuzzlesgame.com/g/hashtag/index.html)

- NYT Connections (https://www.nytimes.com/games/connections)

Neighborle - Identify border countries and states

https://neighborle.com/

Two logic games I've enjoyed lately:

OneUpPuzzle - Sodoku like game where you need to complete a grid (https://www.oneuppuzzle.com)

Queens - A fun thing to do at LinkedIn :) (https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens)

> Globle

Similar to Globle is Worldle - https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/

And while we're on the globe: https://travle.earth/

Speller - Alphabetize as many words as you can in 60 seconds. (https://1-800-rad-dude.com/speller/)

Every user gets the same word list, words change daily.

> Angle - guess the exact arc angle (https://angle.wtf)

I won't spoil today's Angle answer, but it seems like the game should only offer angles less than 180 degrees.

Self-promo: not a daily challenge, but a quick word game https://danieljanus.pl/wladcyslow/

Adding to the list:

Puzzmo - collection of daily puzzles, including crossword, really bad chess, and more (https://www.puzzmo.com/)

Bandle - guess songs by listening to one instrument at a time (https://bandle.app)

Tried the angle.wtf one, but it seems to be stuck at one angle only (320°) on both browsers I tried on mobile, and it never progresses?

Many of these types of games are daily, so I'd expect it's a different angle tomorrow.

(Thanks for the hint.)

Linxicon wasted way too much of my time after you posted this. Great game!

Tradle is too easy. I want a version where you have to guess by imports.

That was super fun, works great with keyboard. Fingers crossed for a seven-figure NYT acquisition :)

Is that how it works? Can you really "own" IP of something as simple?

I thought anyone could implement their own without having to pay the original.

Josh Wardle really lucked out by both accidentally having the best name for that game, and it hitting a cultural firestorm quite quickly. IIRC, NYT are mostly going after other implementations if they have similar names.

You'd need to grow super super large so they'd want to acquire you for your audience.

Fun! And fast!

I didn't realize it reset for every word, so I was worried I was done on 8 words, but by getting that one at the wire, I was able to limp to 17.

At least for today's words, it was a reasonable difficulty ramp, and a pretty easy experience! If I had one note it's that clicking the text of a letter doesn't remove that letter from the word (while clicking the background of a letter DOES remove it).

Anyway, thanks for making/publishing this!

Yeah the escalating difficulty is very well done, the tension ratcheted up bit by bit.

Got to 21

The immediate key-bindings are super clutch + simple.

So much fun on desktop. A nice faded history with strikethrough attempts (optional), would be neat on the UI front.

This makes me miss the original Text Twist, I would love if someone knows how I can play it still.

In the original Text Twist, the shorter words were all in a specified order relative to the word order in the final word. For example, if the word was BIOPIC then TOP comes before TOPIC comes before TIC comes before OPT comes before POT. BIT would be the first word, and COT would be the last.

(technically it was exactly opposite that, they were sorted in reverse of the order in which they appear in the final word, but that's harder to explain)

With Text Twist 2 I guess they decided that was a bug not a feature (it was definitely a feature not a bug) and the order of the smaller words is now randomized. That one small change took the game from something I'd spend hours on to not even a little bit fun.

Anyway to me this was pretty easy, I got all 23. I thought the letter order was very revealing on some of the later clues (like KINGDOM was almost entirely in order already) but maybe that was deliberate, anagramming a 7-letter word in 30s can be a bit hard

One big piece of feedback, though: pressing enter should always clear your current letters (as in text twist)

Super late response, but I play Jumbline 2 these days which is the exact same thing. Only a phone app currently I think though.

Only thing I would change is the shuffling of characters is different for each user which can give a user an advantage over another depending on how they happen shuffle for them

Ok, I'll be shameless and throw my mine in: https://summit-puzzle.me

Fun! I think having a max-width for the main div would help the UI a bunch, the header stretches my entire screen and the "How to Play" modal is pretty wide. It would also be good to be able to close the modal with the Escape key or by clicking outside of it! Lastly, a "Give up" option might be nice. I love the concept and I think the directions are well-written with helpful images.

Thanks, I'll make those changes

I've got a math game to share too! https://www.tristanpendergrass.com/pretty-good-math/

I had so much fun with this, but what's going on with the new domain?

Also - the share link is broken, it states .com instead of .co

Anyway, me and my friends greatly preferred the 23words.com branding

Too bad the keyboard doesn't work (Firefox with "Search for text when you start typing" on). They didn't do the "event.preventDefault(); event.stopPropagation();" dance.

Naturally. You have enabled a setting for Firefox to intercept the keystrokes before the web page even gets a chance to see them. That means the JavaScript to prevent default action would never run.

Not true, the JS _does_ get a chance to prevent the search behavior. It's not a problem with other games.

This needs to capture the backspace key so it doesn't send you back a page. Wordle used to have this problem. In the meantime, opening this in a fresh tab should help.

I didn't have this issue in Firefox on macOS. What browser are you using?

Firefox on Linux Mint. Maybe it only impacts my system, or you were in a tab with no history?

I had history. Back button was enabled and clicking it took me back to HN.

Apart from the domain name, is this the same as

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

There seems to be a bug today, I typed "sunshine" at 21/23 and it said it was not in the word list. But the answer was supposedly also "sunshine". Could it be that the position of each S is somehow artificially significant?

I also couldn't get sunshine to work today, and I tried swapping the S's as well. Neither worked.

Had the same problem!

– Different people (browsers) get different randomizations, which can make a difference in difficulty. It would be better for it to be deterministic (including the shuffles), with regard to "Challenge a friend".

– Shuffling should cause a penalty, like reducing the remaining time by one second.

– There is an easy way to cheat the timer by closing the tab and reopening it after finding the solution (on browsers that save the state of closed tabs). This could be avoided by basing the timer on absolute time.

– The keyboard interface is great.

– For some reason, I found today's words much less difficult than yesterday's. :)

Fun but seems a bit too easy, but based on the percentage of people getting to 23 it seems okay?

The last word was 7 letters I think? Would increase it to 8/9 letters to really make it hard

I survived all 23 words, "Top 1% of players today".

Don't chase the letters with the mouse, you can type on your keyboard and hit backspace to shave off some seconds.

22 here, top 3%.

I like this, may add it to my daily set, but it's a little stressful.

I'd like a Clear option that doesn't involve a Del key.

What was RITDF then?

Drift

A little late to the party but another game! A music game for guessing where the mystery artist is from in the world based on a song snippet... I usually try to guess by language but it's a lot harder when they are singing :o

https://pindrop.cc/daily

The countdown to the next puzzle is in the negative and is counting up. FYI, I'm not in North America.

I got all the words. Fun game, but it felt kind of easy.

Is there a keyboard shortcut to shuffle? I tried space to no avail.

Shift key. Disable stickykeys in advance.

@puzzledpenguin Thanks for the game. I played the other version before you migrated it here. Is it possible the dictionary is too small? I noticed a number of repeats across days/playing marathon mode that made it easier.

Excellent! Got stumped on 10 but brain wasn’t in gear. Tomorrow will be better!

I like this concept. Wordle is very fun but I never liked how it was constrained to five letters. It felt like my brain was becoming very fluent in 5 letter words but not other words

I found myself wanting to shuffle with the spacebar (so I wouldn't have to move my pinky fingers from A and L in order to shuffle with a shift key).

For the first five or six words, I thought I had 30 seconds to get 23 words, which seemed kind of unnecessarily difficult.

I have a feeling that this game on a touch device is way faster than having to move your mouse around and click!

Keyboard is very fast for this.

It would be nice if when you fail, it tells you the answer rather than switching screens.

It does tell you the answer

Is there a key to clear a word automatically? Seems the space bar would work well.

Fun! When you lose, I'd like to see the answer(s) for that letter combo.

Love it! I would like the possibility to keep trying when I fail.

agreed, an endless mode would be nice. perhaps it's not implemented by-design to keep us coming back - it's certainly going to work on me. opening the game in a new private tab will let you make another attempt :)

Yet another fun game that will die because it tried to replicate the "one game a day" model for no reason. I like it, and want to play more. Why can't I? At the very least let me go back and retry the words that I missed? Not everything has to be Wordle.

I like the daily game format because it has everyone playing the same puzzle, but I agree with your other criticism. You should be able to try again or possibly disable the timer.

I admit that having an archive would be nice, and some daily games do have that or an unlimited mode.

I share your frustration, but not your confidence that it will impact the success of the game. The "daily challenge" format, though annoying, does seem to hook people.

Fantastic game. Kudos.

Great fun. Good work!

got 21/23. Pretty fun!

Nice try but "basket" is obviously not a real word

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