Show HN: Zanagrams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Zanagrams

zanagrams.com

400 pointspompomsheep107 comments

It’s basically Ribbit from Puzzmo, which is fine because reimplementations let you experiment with different gameplay.

https://www.puzzmo.com

Came here to say this, Ribbit is a lot of fun, and Puzzmo in general is a really solid site.

Wow, this post blew up! Thank you everyone for all the helpful feedback. I’ve just deployed a few updates:

  - Added a short playable tutorial for new players to learn how the game works.

  - Added a timer below the grid. You can hide this in the settings if you don’t want the extra pressure!

  - Fixed some bonus words based on your recommendations.

I also made a bonus HN themed puzzle as a thanks for all the feedback - https://zanagrams.com/hackernews

Tutorial was great! And I would like the option to give up.

A hint would maybe be good. You could highlight the first letter and a direction, for example.

The share functionality could be improved. Sharing the score and time to the specific puzzle would be nice.

Also I came back to this thread to comment that this is the most engaging, fun, and satisfying word puzzle game I've maybe ever played. My only complaint is that there aren't more puzzles!

Thanks for the fun :)

Wow, I found the Hacker News one way easier than normal (01:15). I'm devouring these, though—every day you release one, I'll play it!

If it was really an “HN themed puzzle”, all the letters would be A or I and the minimum word length would be 2.

I’m kidding of course - great game!

Very cool! Idea: show the definition of the word when you find it, so you can learn new words.

(edit: ah, I see they are shown later)

Congratulations on your launch! It’s cool seeing all the word games on here taking off

Bookmarked the site! It is a fun puzzle, NYT should add it to their games.

The playable tutorial is brilliant. It's a very fun game, well done!

Nice game! I found 20 words.

I was a bit stunned by the concept of "bonus words". I found that every word should count. Also because some words are just plural forms (e.g. stroke+s), so kinda cheep?!

Keep ups the good work!

I think the board (and disappearing letters) are made with a list of words in mind. Thus, to complete the puzzle (dissolve all letters) you cannot count the bonus words as they were not accounted when creating the letter graph.

"bonus words" are often obscure or embarrassing in some way, so you're not required to find them to win

https://zanagrams.com/puzzles/5.json

This was definitely a challenge until I figured out how it works. I originally was confused by the connections and started off embarrassingly slow, but once I got a few words and letters started to disappear, I was able to power through it pretty quickly. A solid game. Suggest adding a timed option so users can brag/compare/share their time.

I enjoyed this and loved the minimal UI, good copywriting, and tasteful animations. My brain gets a little bit stuck on words that I can see but aren’t valid because of a missing connection, but I get that this is one of the main points of the puzzle. Anyway, great job!

Cool game. Snus isn't in the word list btw

Found six bonus words.

https://squaredle.app/

Was gonna say, reminded me a lot of Squaredle!

There are a couple of games like this on Android I play:

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.vayunmathur.gam...

https://github.com/plhosk/wordtracer

They're both on FDroid

Great puzzle! Is there a way to give up and see all the answers? After 20 minutes or so still have 8 words to find. (Not a native English speaker.)

+1 for this. Also not a native speaker and can't for the life of find the two last words in the #5

Damn it, it was the longest word I've already found in plural form :/ Not sure this is good puzzle design to be honest

Thanks for the feedback. Do you think finding plural should automatically find the root word as well?

I would try to generate puzzles that don't involve plurals at all.

It happened twice that the word I missed was the plural of a word I already found. After finding a word I don't follow it again so finding the plural happened by accident twice, and it felt cheap.

I'm stuck. Does that mean I chose the wrong word earlier and used up an essential letter? Does the sequence of word guesses matter? Is there an Undo feature so I can back up and try a different order of guesses? Can I get a hint? Is there a way to give up and see the solution (order of word guesses)?

You're not stuck, the board only removes letters and connections that are not used by any other word (probably excluding "bonus words"). So the word(s) you're missing are still on the board.

No hint feathre though, the hints are the letters going away. You'll probably have to use a scrabble search or something.

This was helpful feedback thank you. I've tried to make this more clear with a new tutorial and updataed instructions

Gemini can solve them if you need a hint or want to give up and see the solution.

the score should include how many bonus words you found (out of how many there were in total) and instead of time it should count how many tries you made because technically you could brute force this and try all combinations. counting each try would eliminate that (for anyone trying to get a high score)

You might make a wrong guess add a little penalty time to the clock.

I agree that the "share" representation should include the number of bonus words found. Or just the triple of "total words / tries / wall-clock time."

It would also make sense to share some kind of metric for "how early did you find the longest word."

Fun! I like how the puzzle naturally gets easier as you solve it. How do you decide which words to include?

Thanks. I use a combination of AI to first score the words by obscurity and then manually decide which ones to include based on this score and my own judgement.

I then manually test each of the puzzles and throw out any that I feel weren't "fun" to solve for whatever reason

Pretty fun, took me about 10 minutes but found 24 words 10 of them bonus. This was #5 for future viewers.

Edit: welp, spent another 15 mins and managed to solve the previous 4. Currently whipping up a custom version for myself that gives a new set of words related to a theme on each solve, love it.

Having made a word game myself[0], this was highly entertaining! Thanks :)

What dictionary are you using?

[0] https://jcuenod.github.io/phrase-maze-poc/

This is so much fun. And something while playing reminded me of a this video I saw where someone asks her boyfriend "what does Y-E-S spell", and he said "yes". Then she asked him what "E-Y-E-S" spelled, and he couldn't figure it out (he kept saying "eee... yes?"). Anyway, I was looking at the remaining letters with just one word left to go. Four of them formed a word I had already guessed, plus one letter, but didn't make any sense with that additional letter. Until it did. I won't spoil which was it was, but it was in puzzle #1.

Love how the connections disappear once the letter is used up. Feels progressive

The rules should probably explicitly mention the minimum length of four letters. (It's a reasonable rule; it just wasn't obvious from reading the info in "how to play")

I also must have a weird vocabulary. "Fete" was treated as an uncommon bonus word, which doesn't seem particularly esoteric to me, but "tarragon" was one of the ones I needed to finish a certain puzzle, and I had never heard of that before.

Bonus words for me just now included NITS and TITS! I think the explanation about them being lesser known just confuses; it's more that they're not essential to completing the puzzle.

1:40 with (I think) two bonus words. It would be nice to have bonus words counted at the end. Maybe some way of setting a score based on time plus bonus words.

1:25 with one bonus word on the HN special. I saw that the bonus words are highlighted in orange in the final word list so yes, it was two on the first puzzle.

Cool that they list the definitions of the words afterwards. This makes it even more fun for non-native speakers, as it adds a free learning aspect to it.

How is the puzzle generation? can you fully automate generating good puzzles or do you tune them by hand?

I really enjoyed this, and hope to continue doing so.

I have it semi automated but I've found they need to be manually reviewed to make fun puzzles.

Basically I start with an 8, 9 or 10 letter word as the core of the puzzle. I then have a generator add random letters and paths around this until it makes a grid with a good number of valid words.

I then run the words though GPT 5.5 which scores them on how "common" the word is to the average person. This is very subjective as everyone has very different vocabularies.

I then manually decide which words to include as core required words or bonus words.

Finally the puzzle is tested by my wife and mum to see if it is "fun" or it goes in the bin haha.

That is how I imagined it. It felt there must have been some human element. I appreciate your effort.

Initially I thought I would feel cheated and the solution must require knowledge of some obscure scrabble player only words. I was pleased the solutions felt honest. For that reason I don't think you should offer an option to give up and reveal the answers.

Nive work! I solved all five puzzles and only annoyance was the quite a few singular+plural forms in the same puzzle. I expected all unique words.

The instructions are unclear for my input device. I'm on a macOS webkit browser, and I have to click each individual letter, _then click one last time after all letters are highlighted_ to mark the work as found. This falls way outside of the directions "Drag Play to start."

You can just click the first letter, then drag through the rest. When I moved from mobile to desktop, I also thought it was click-only, but dragging works in Chrome and Safari.

Hmm I'm also macOS webkit and can drag no problem. Are you using Safari?

It is also possible to tap each individual letter like you described as an alternative control method but I've found dragging to be more intuitive so is the standard control.

On desktop you can also type the letters with your keyboard ;)

I found #6 unnecessarily difficult. While I personally really enjoy puzzles, primarily logic ones and spelling ones, this melted my brain. Maybe you could add a "hint" button that shows you which letter is the starting letter for a word in the remaining to-be-found list.

If you see a letter with only one line coming from it it’s either the last or first letter of a word.

You should add a scoreboard! I got zanagram #5 in 3 minutes and 53 seconds. Also found two bonus words

I thought I was slow but now I see others took 10 minutes and 20 minutes! Maybe I'm not so slow!

Zanagrams #5 Complete in 03:53 https://zanagrams.com/

wow, that was fast. it took me 11+, but found 7 bonus ones.

I like that it also handles words that aren't planned in. You get a nice "bonus word" popout.

Yeah, I got "TUNS" as a bonus word.

Yeah tuns (a word well known to homebrewers) is not as esoteric as yttria (a word known to.. chemists?)

Yttrium is a chemical element with the symbol Y and atomic number 39 :)

Not sure how to vote for it, though.

Simple and fun, appreciate the definitions! Was wondering about ideas for creating a simple game using the vocab list from my koreader app, but will probably need to be a crossword type game where I need to match definitions with words. This just reminded me of that :)

Fun game! On iOS I frequently triggered a double-tap zoom accidentally, and it’s weirdly difficult to zoom back out once that happens (a second double-tap doesn’t work, and pinch to zoom out only works in some areas of the page).

Fixed this thanks!

Love the game.

I think it would be even better if each word had an edge only used by the word, such that each successful guess removes an edge and you couldn't guess words twice (assuming each word only has one path).

Zanagrams #5 Complete in 22:17

https://files.catbox.moe/fgmb4b.jpeg

Super fun, i found a tons of words and the last 3 ones were really hard to find

The only thing I would add would be to keep track of the words already found.

It’s there, click on “words”

Very nice! I solved them all in the backyard on a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

It was fun! I like how unlike the nyt games one, you can get additional information from the edges' existence. Would advise removing having both plural/singular forms of a word. Great work!

Great game! I really like how it removes any possible letters or connections. I managed to finish two zanagrams without any wrong answers. It’d be great if there was a way to gain a “perfect” score.

Good game. I did not think I was going to be able to make it.

Zanagrams #5 Complete in 11:23 https://zanagrams.com/

Is there any way to lose? With the letters disappearing after they're no longer used, I feel this becomes an exercise in attrition instead of a game.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to give up, because I can't find any more words. I found 8 (2 bonus ones), and am stuck finding any more. There should be a "reveal" button, so you can see what else you were supposed to find.

Edit: solved it! Being stuck is annoying, though.

Zanagrams #6 Complete in 05:53 https://zanagrams.com/

Fun game. I found had trouble seeing the color contrast, so I modified the connection color by updating the CSS for .root.tile to #aaffff

Which colors specifically if you dont mind me asking?

I love it!

But the bonus word (a word most player would miss) on 29/7 was not very subtle. No spoilers, but you won't miss it >.<

Haha just a common bird family. Get your head out of the gutter!

Small songbirds apparently

so i found two bonus words today

The name of the game is confusing, I thought I had to find anagrams and didn't understand how to rearrange the letters

This entered the daily rotation (currently dominated by NYT Games) for our wife and me, thank you!

I like it! #6 in 5 mins, but I have no idea if that's good or not. A percentile score at the end would be nice!

I've added a global average time for now to each puzzle if that's nice?

I will look into potentially adding percentiles in the next few days once I see how big the ranges are!

I love the average time! I think it would be quite nice to have a % of how many others found each bonus word too.

Great, I just tried #7, comparing against the average is definitely better, thanks

Interesting game! Is this an original idea? Is there plan to add "endless" number of zanagrams?

Love this! Added to bookmarks. Wish it had a counter for bonus words so I know if I missed them.

Loved this, cleared all the puzzles available in one go. Thanks for making and sharing!

Cool game! Definitely needs the bonus words counter in the shareable results snippet.

Cool game! Well that’s a sign I need to launch my word game this week if any

Cool game. Too bad you didn't include "oranges" on #4

Feels very like Squaredle.

Love the design and would love a french version !

I love it! I could play games like this for hours :D

Nice! I solved the English and the Spanish versions.

Nice game, Feels progressive

Nice, keep up the good work!

Its addictive :-) Well done

pretty cool. how are you deciding or generating puzzles ?

Simple but cool!

Similar is https://squaredle.app !

Fun. I could see myself playing this while on the train, etc.

Nicely done.

Awesome tutorial! The first real level (today's one) took me over 10 minutes lol. The HN took me like 2 something :D

Very satisfying puzzle!

Fun game, managed in just over 3 min. How are people taking so long...?

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