Show HN: Jourdle (Coop Wordle)

You and a partner have 3 puzzles to solve in a row with a limited number of guesses - and you can see each others' previous guesses, which gives you enough info to accomplish this. If either of you gets all 3 puzzles it counts as a 3-star solve. The name is a mashup of Journey + Wordle, the hope is you have a connection with this anonymous ephemeral other player.

I've built a number of Wordle variants eg Xordle, and have been allergic to making anything other than static websites for my hobby projects.

I still kind of am, but LLM-agents have changed the calculus for me on setting up and maintaining a server, not to mention building the code. All stuff within my capabilities to begin with, but the stress and hassle feels so much lower.

So I recently made some services for my static games to let you see replays of other peoples' games as well as spectate live players solving the puzzle you just solved. That's live on Xordle, Fibble, Warmle, Shuntle and Double-Dabble. It's pretty fun.

That inspired me to go for a multiplayer game. Got it done in a literal weekend, but of course I had lots of pieces in place already as mentioned. The game is build with React/Typescript - I started with a clone of one of my other projects, and is hosted as a static project on github with cloudflare in front. That's how I do all my minigames. The services are written in Go, running on an Amazon Lightsail free instance. It was all done in Codex CLI.

If you can't find a player for the daily puzzle within a day, you get the option to play with a bot. And if your coop player disconnects there is a bot takeover. Making the bot was a lot of fun, and you can also just do practice games with the bot. It can be a little annoying if you're too much faster than it to make guesses, but it was fun to try to make it play at the right pace, and make reasonable but not perfect guesses.