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Show HN: One More Letter

playonemoreletter.com

91 pointshmate959 comments

It seems to disallow valid words made with the same letters, which doesn't feel fair. (I don't want to spoil an answer, but -- especially when the word it insists on is arguably French!)

Felt the same way. Failed the last three like that with legitimate words.

None of those are French words. How many letters is the word you say is French?

Four

It won't let you use the same letters in the same order again (e.g. LEASE -> LEASED). I think that's fair.

I agree that this would be fair, but it seemingly not true. "SEA" disallows "SEAL" on the next turn (correct answer ALES,) but then you are suddenly allowed to use "SEALED" later - because of my assumption of the rule, I didn't get this stage until the clue. Same with "LEASE" and "LEADERS," which are both allowed to use "LEA."

So it seems as though the rule is, you must mix up the letters for the following answer, but further answers are fair game to reuse letter combinations (or, it is applied arbitrarily.) Neither are very intuitive IMO.

OK yeah, that does sound fine once you say it, but since the only stated rule is “one more letter”, I don’t think it’s obvious enough.

I tried "KITERS" and "TRIKES" at the 5 letter level, but the app specifically wanted "STRIKE." It kinda demoralized me to have come up with two answers and not be able to proceed, I realized that it wasn't worth trying to guess before the clue came up so I quit out.

wtf is kiters?

kiters = kiteboarders. Welcome to Australia, the country where the words are made up and meanings don't matter.

All words are made up

That’s what luipugs said.

An interesting twist on this game might be that spelling is enforced to be non-standard. Here are letters, here’s the meaning, make the word but it must not be spelt right.

No, they said that in Australia words are made up. I'm not disagreeing, but I'm saying that it's not specific to Australia!

Tangentially, it's funny to me that you happen to use "spelt" here; I've always felt that it doesn't look like a "real" word and choose to use "spelled" instead, but I also recognize that this is entirely my own personal thing and not reflective of anything other than my own issues. It's a great example to me though of how trying to push personal feelings about words against a wider consensus mostly just leads to frustration without any real gains, so it's less frustrating in the long to be able to live with the fact that they won't always match up.

Language is weird and wonderful and despite often being inconsistent and sometimes outright annoying, it's also extremely powerful, and it works well maybe because of the resiliency it needs to withstand the very real limitations it has, and I choose to embrace it all and enjoy it! (I also suspect is why I enjoy puns way more than average; to quote one of my former coworkers, "words are toys")

People flying kites?

Same thing here happened with 'irks' and 'risk'

Spoiler alert, it seems to be like Wordle in that the same puzzle is given to everyone for that day.

I opened the tab in the background and when i got around to it later somehow i lost the game.... i think you need an official "start" button to prevent this.

Yeah this happened to me too. A timer with auto-start is a bad combination.

Also some instructions. I had no idea what I was supposed to do at first.

ngmi

So much this. I pride myself on my intuition but three letters and nothing else to go on left me completely lost.

I assumed by the title that I was supposed to type "one more letter" to complete a word, but nope, apparently had to rearrange existing ones.

Pretty fun. But I saw this issue come up on multiple days: Letters were AIERNGT for the final word of day #2. I tried INGRATE. Didn't work. Then I tried TEARING. That worked. But then on the win screen, it said GRANITE. Huh...

I really enjoyed this! I do agree with the other comments that a larger vocabulary would be nice. The way some games handle this is by giving bonus points for words that are unintended by the author but are perceived as valid. Or maybe giving extra time? IMO, keep the vocab a bit limited, though (maybe top 30k words or similar).

It reminds me of Wordflower. I like this! With one caveat:

The word games that have been posted in the last few days feature a timer component, and it's game over when you miss the timer. I think they'd be more rewarding if it weren't sudden death. Instead it should just let you play through and give you a score out of 5. Especially if it is going to pick obscure words (as another commenter says - arguably one word isn't English and that feels like a bad reason to "lose").

More feedback:

- I was intently staring at letters and didn't notice you get a definition as a hint! Maybe the hint UI needs a tweak.

- it needs to allow permutations that are also words, or at least provide an additional reward for finding those (maybe an extra half point).

- there should be a "clear" button next to shuffle.

- there should be a "pause" button which hides everything and stops the timer. My waitress came by as I was playing and I lost.

It's pretty clear that they're leaving the time limit in because it attracts engagement in the form of comments like yours.

Please don't give me a hint if I didn't ask for it! Maybe make a hint button that becomes enabled at a certain time.

Fun! As others mentioned, it's unclear why certain words are rejected. Without clues, there's no reason the player would know which of several anagrams is the "right" one. Seems like it'd be better to accept any valid word, or perhaps have some kind of bonus for finding all of them.

This is great! I've been looking for an alternative to this for a while: https://g1.globo.com/jogos/dito/ This is definitely the kind of game I'd play on a flight.

I liked playing the game! A few things that worked well for me - a gradual ladder meant I knew word length was going to increase by 1 and was prepared mentally, the timer was not in my face distracting me as I tried thinking, the clue comes around the 25s mark to help me get unstuck. What didn't work for me was valid words not being accepted, leaving you a little demoralized. I see a lot of suggestions already around this and I don't have anything more specific to add to that.

But overall, this was fun!

Really rewarding keyboard UX on this. Typing felt great. I couldn't figure out how to shuffle or give up via the keyboard. Shuffle with escape would make sense.

I’d vote shuffle with space bar.

It's a good game. A little easier than wordle because you can go back and forth with variations on a few words by adding s and ed. Maybe a harder variant could be you go to the next level with a new set of letters still adding one more. Another variant could be you have to solve like a stack of them, so like you have 5 of these then to get to the next level all 5 have to progress, each with a different pool of letters.

I guess I'll check back later and try to remember that I can't have the tab open in the background? :)

EDIT: OK, I found the previous puzzles link. Cute! Though I got a bug on the second one - (ROT13 for spoilers) apparently the answer was "tenavgr" but I put in "grnevat" and it still accepted it (but other prompts had not accepted alternate-but-valid words)

TIL the word (ROT13 for spoilers) "fgbcvat" :)

Loved this. The countdown added a nice urgency that other word games don't have. Kinda fiendish, kinda fun.

Also enjoyed that it was a near-mouse free typing game. Would love a keyboard shortcut for shuffle. And an anagram circle perhaps?

A game rather like this is described in Gwen Raverat’s Edwardian memoir, Period Piece. There you have to keep finding new words one letter longer, and they get ridiculous combos like TRUMPET, STRUMPET, (thou) TRUMPETST, STRUMPETST…

Unlike everyone else here, I enjoyed this. A good hit for the day, see you tmrw

Reminds me a little of contact (https://www.ludozofi.com/home/games/contact/)

Very cool, little improvements: the hint I got contained the ethymological "root" of the word to find. Might be better to make the hint never leak too much on the word itself

Thank you guys for the feedback. I'll fix valid words being rejected, having space as a keyboard shortcut for shuffle, and maybe a "zen" mode without a timer.

The staggered entry animation of the letters on page load is lovely. The typing also felt rewarding.

Bit of feedback, should the timer pause when reading the how to play or opening settings?

I enjoyed this. I’d like unexpected word points but this is nice.

One More Letter #7

5/5 words · 1:34

https://playonemoreletter.com

Awesome game! A potential UX update: if you fail a guess, the letters go back down below in the same configuration as your guess.

But others might disagree!

Funny. I type and pass two words. When I see S E E A L, I can't find the right combination. So what's the purpose of this web?

This is a fantastic little word game. The staggered entry animation and the typing UX are incredibly polished.

Super fun game! When are you gonna sell this to NYT games to play alongside with world daily? lol

All I get is this: "Today's run is over."

This is a spiritual descendant of Wordle, cool idea!

Interesting. how did you build it?

Hey this is a great game. Nice work

Fun, but I don't like trivia.

"Today's run is over"

I hate games of this kind. "You failed. Try again tomorrow." I won't be back. It wasn't enough fun to remember. And I'm not likely to upvote because of these reasons (so it won't appear in my 'upvoted submissions')

Coupled with the immediate timer start, no instructions. Meh.

My reaction too, but then I found the button to try the previous days, and it was enough for me to figure out the game :)

Very fun!!

It’s annoying that DEALERS doesnt work when the answer is LEADERS

MARC? MARCEL? Come on

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