Show HN: Bevel – Guess the book from its opening passage | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bevel – Guess the book from its opening passage

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3 pointsknotalegend4 comments

Built Bevel because my girlfriend is in a book club and I wanted to make her something. It’s a daily puzzle: you read a 200ish-word public-domain passage and try to deduce the author, decade, nationality, and title in five guesses with adaptive hints in between guesses. Wordle-ish mechanics, but for classic literature. There’s a Discord activity too if you enjoy it & want to add it to your server. Bevel is currently unverified on Discord, so only addable to smaller servers for now. Would love any feedback.

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Does your girlfriend's book club read public domain classic literature?

They’re on like their 3rd book and haven’t yet, but she’s a big Agatha Christie fan & there’s a few hurdles to jump through if I want to include more modern stuff. Plus the classics are pretty recognizable so that helps too

I just feel like, as probably a bigger reader than most, I could only identify a handful of pre-1800s books by first passages (call me ishmael?). I thought this was an interesting concept but ultimately I don't see a way to become popular / viable.

Now that said, and also just a thought: The idea of motifs recently came to me for a similar book project (for example stephen king and alice munro are linked by the "small town secrets" motif). that's something more relatable that you might be able to gamify. Thoughts?

Yeah I’ve been keeping an eye on the stats and making some micro adjustments where I can to make it easier (and more satisfying for players who don’t solve the full thing, but do get a couple categories). I put opening passage in the title of this, but it actually selects a range from the most popular part of the book & gives me a handful of passages to choose from— and then I can make some manual adjustments to the range too if I don’t like the suggestions

I was thinking about changing the hints more… like loldle (wordle esque game for league of legends) uses emojis in their classic mode, something like that might be easier. Could just add it as an addition or maybe as a mercy hint… still thinking about it & seeing where people get stuck statistics wise

Your idea sounds pretty fun too, and that wouldn’t have the same public domain restrictions that I’ve locked myself to lol

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