Hacker News Reader

Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Are opponents autopets-style opponents (e.g. recorded and replayed so you don’t have to wait?)

I’m confused about a lot of things about the game; I guess most particularly the letter draws — do I and my opponents get the exact same sequence of letters when traded in? Do we draw from the same (replaceable? Non-replaceable?) bag?

When I went to sudden death I saw very different words — in my case, I drew a J — was that it, since my foe only used a word with a G, I was basically guaranteed a win. Was that poor word choice on his part, poor or no trading, or a different tile set the foe had?

I think it would be nice to see all the possible letters in the ‘bag’ when we’re looking at trading.

Finally, is there a time component? It would be nice to get some indications about the opponent - maybe showing where they are hovering / clicking, or a clock countdown.

Also - fun!

View on HN

Great questions, thanks - there is a tutorial!

There's a "bag" just like Scrabble and you're both drawing tiles from it. You can see the bag too, definitely should be visible during swapping, great call.

CPU players have heuristics and different word difficulties they play - I want to do a new post on that soon.

There's no time component... we tried that initially but felt too rushed.

Where is this tutorial? I see nothing on the link nor on wordtrak.com that really explains how to play. I tried to play Daily and I had no idea. I tried dragging tiles onto squares to spell words, no tiles stuck anywhere, gave up.

> I tried dragging tiles onto squares to spell words, no tiles stuck anywhere, gave up.

I think the first move is a forced swap, though from a gameplay design perspective I'm not sure why. It took me a while to figure this out; it should definitely be made more obvious (assuming it's intentional).

Good callout. My idea here was that you commonly get a garbage hand to start the game, and this helps you build a better first word.

It's the ? button on each game, and on the new game screen. I'll make it more obvious. Also here: http://wordtrak.com/manual

I punted on dragging tiles since it felt janky...considering revisiting though.

There needs to be a practice game mode, or play old games (without sign up).

As it is, I played halfway through the first round, realized I had misunderstood the rules and was stuck, so I gave up. I'm unlikely to come back in 24 hours.

I did read the tutorial, but the swapping/bag mechanism wasn't clear until I used it wrong a few times.

Also the bag icon is unclear. It was only when I got stuck and switches into "click random things" mode that I tried it.

Thanks for responding! I think I'd strongly, strongly prefer a version of this game where my opponent and I got the same letters, sequenced. Compare to a normal Scrabble game - you need a lot of words played to get over draw variance (and in fact there is still some even for a full game).

There are good analogues for tournament games with some chance, like bridge.

I was thinking about this too, especially since there's a literal "race" condition for who swaps first. Perhaps it would be fairest given the async nature to give each player their own bag. Great suggestion!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com