This is not a game for me - I donât enjoy scrambled letter games in the first place, and I donât really respond to time pressure in games. That said, I donât think you should change it. Itâs conceptually clear as it is, and adding a forgiving mode would just make it wishy washy. The simplicity is appealing and it doesnât have to be for everyone!
Just a vote since I'm seeing a lot of anti-timer sentiment: I like the timer because it creates a conclusive way for the game to end, and causes me to spend a lot less time on the game, I imagine. But I also think it makes sense to have a non-timer mode. It would also be cool to have like 3 shuffles that you are allowed to use. As an exit to the non-timer mode, I think it would be fine to have an "I give up " button.
I also love the countdown. Counterintuitively it makes the game less stressful â the counter goes back to 30 no matter what. If the timer counted up, you'd constantly need to care about getting each one as fast as possible, or fret about one that's taking you minutes, etc.
With the countdown, you more want to care about the high level stuff: Keep your brain agile enough to get the next one, figure out more general patterns, ensure you "cover" the promising patterns, notice tough spots (with tons of patterns) where you you'll need to lock in. That stuff is more fun to focus on than speed.
Everyone wants to fail less, sure. It's not surprising people's feedback focuses on the mechanic that made you fail! That doesn't mean changing that bit will make the game more fun.
> If the timer counted up, you'd constantly need to care about getting each one as fast as possible, or fret about one that's taking you minutes, etc.
The timer doesnât have to be visible at all until the end.
> Everyone wants to fail less, sure.
It has nothing to do with not wanting to fail. Sometimes people just want to chill a bit or kill a few minutes with a simple word puzzle that engages your game without being stressful. This game doesnât even let you repeat the challenges you took, so to play it you always have to be highly engaged. Thatâs fine for some games, but not every game needs to be like that, and this one doesnât.
No oneâs asking timer mode to go away, or even become the default, just to have the alternative option.
I'm totally fine with the way it works, because, well, it's a game, losing should be losing. I mean, I kinda want to continue, but I'm glad I'm not allowed to. I didn't make it. There will be another chance tomorrow.
But I'd like to propose allowing keyboard input. Losing because of your mouse skills in a pattern recognition game is annoying.
I wondered about this because I used a keyboard to do it. But then I thought maybe krick used mobile and there's no onscreen keyboard. But then I realized that krick said mouse skills and so is probably on a desktop. I think maybe just some graphical indicator that you can type would be helpful for first time users.
No, I did try to type, but nothing happened. I seem to remember I did check that I had English layout turned on, but maybe I actually didn't. Really cannot guess any better than that what might have been the problem.
Anyway, doesn't matter, it was totally my mistake, everything works for me as well as for everyone else.
If you're not set on a "survival mode" design, could you design it as counting up instead of counting down? And maybe showing a "par" time, that way players can opt into the challenge vs. just a morning brainteaser.
Complete gut reaction to your first question, my preference would be two fold:
1. An option to start the game in timeless mode
2. When I fail a word, prior to showing me the word, give me the option to enter timeless mode for the rest of the run, such that it doesn't ruin the current round, and that run is now excluded
As for the second, that's more suggestive and I don't care as much either way. Personally me for me I've just been going down the archive trying each day. I enjoy competitive games, so once I miss a word I don't have much interest in continuing on.
I'd prefer a mode where you fail the word, but can continue to the next word.
Perhaps it is intentionally part of the design, but being a bit of a perfectionist, I failed a couple of times, and found that actually the longer words were (often) easier than the shorter ones...
1. Yes, hints, like maybe the position of a random letter, then another, etc. The game could allow you to "buy" more letters with your existing score (and maybe an initial amount: everyone starts at, say, 36?)
2. Yes being able to continue would be great, it's frustrating that the game just stops.
As someone who definitely gets worked up when thereâs a timer (still got all 18; top 1% really? Might be good to show a rough number of total players), I donât really get it without a timer.
I am with the people asking for a scramble/ shuffle button. I have to do anagrams all the time in cryptic crosswords and sometimes it requires seeing things in a totally different order to unlock the answer.
Oftentimes feedback is useful to address a complaint. âLots of people are frustrated with Xâ is great signal. The solution might not be (but certainly sometimes is) the fixes they recommend; but the pain theyâre expressing is real.
The timer is OK, IMHO, but longer words should give you more time to guess. Makes little sense to give people 30 seconds to guess both a four-letter and a seven-letter word.
That would also let you scale to any arbitrary word length.
Donât reset to 30s for each word. Just add 30s (or 20s). So if I am fast in the early rounds, I am rewarded in later rounds by having 1:43 to work on a word I am completely stuck on.
The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and Iâm not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. Iâve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game.
If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Relax Mode vs. Challenge Mode.
By the way: I really like the overall design of Zanagrams and 18 Words. These are small puzzle games with very simple, clean UIs. They work crisply and I've noticed you've been tidying up Zanagrams, adding minor features and settings. They have a very Classic Web feel to them. It's not like you're trying to get me to watch ads or subscribe to your newsletter or are just breadcrumbs to some for-profit thing. I like having a handful of very easy to pick up puzzles/toys when I need to fidget. They help keep me away from TikToks and Shorts.
I think Zach Gage (developer of excellent games including Really Bad Chess, Spelltower, etc) says on Adam Conover's podcast that for many people they have difficulty improving at a skill when they have time (or other) pressure
Thus, he always includes a relaxed mode to let someone practice without any stress. Incidentally, he realized that some people only ever play in the relaxed mode!
Maybe if it counted up I would be less annoyed by it. I like how the NYT does it with their crossword app. If you complete it under some threshold you get a gold star but there's no upper limit on the time.
The Zanagrams game, which AFACK is from the same developer (?), actually does this - it counts up like a stopwatch, then compares your time to the global average at the end.
Having a timer is maybe not so much the problem, but there's no reward here for doing early words quickly and no appreciation for the fact that difficulty is not linear. Would be nice if you could bank up some time for when harder ones come.
I'd probably say there instead of a Challenge Mode and a Relax Mode like you said, it could just be a combined mode where there is a timer but after it goes out it simply continues the game on Relax Mode.
Or alternatively every word still has the timer and then at the end if you finish, it tells you how many words you completed under the timer and gives you a score based on that.
And then maybe an option for those who don't want the timer to show at all, since maybe it adds a bit of pressure. You can have just a simple option that removes the timer entirely from view
Another idea: maybe time how long you take for each word, and for the competitive among us, show stats on how long you took compared to everyone else, and a leaderboard for who took the least total time.
In one sense I really enjoy the timer up to the point that I lose, but it feels very unsatisfactory, especially if I lose early, & I'm acutely aware the difficulty level it's set at will be experienced radically differently by different players (to the exclusion of most I would imagine).
Having a timerless mode is very much needed as an option - there's no real risk of "cheating" with these cookie-based browser games anyway since I could just have infinite retries in a private tab if I felt like doing that.
Yea, the timer is a little stressful though I understand the purpose/design behind it. I do like the suggestion of the no timer or a relaxed mode with.
PS anyone have any other fun, simple games like this and Zanagrams? I found https://maptap.gg/ recently and that also gives me the same Classic Web feeling that OP mentioned.
Not everyone plays games for purposeless dumb challenges and difficulty. Games are supposed to be fun. Sometimes you just want to chill and engage the brain at a leisurely pace.
While I agree that for some people games with a time limit are not fun, I don't think the challenges and difficulty should be classified as "purposeless" and "dumb". For many the challenge/difficulty IS the fun part, and they serve a genuine purpose. If you don't like that, then play a different game, but that doesn't mean the game you don't like is useless.
Right. I donât mean every challenge and difficulty is purposeless and dumb, just that those donât have to be the goal, and that sometimes an easy game is what you want.
Tangentially, I have noticed some of the most well-balanced difficult games I have ever played were the ones with very granular difficulty settings. Examples include CrossCode and Celeste. Crypt of the Necrodancer too, though the customisation there feels like it crosses into too granular. In each I changed the difficulty settings exactly once, for optional challenges, and it made the games way more enjoyable.
All games should have the option to have the timer turned off.
I regularly do cryptic crosswords (so this sort of game is in my wheelhouse). My goal is to complete the puzzle, not do so in a particular time. Completing it is often hard (depending on which paper I've picked up). There is no timer when I'm say with paper and pen, so it baffles me that every online newspaper cryptic has a timer on by default, and in some cases it can't be disabled.
It's also the thing that "ruined" the LinkedIn puzzles for me. They're generally fun puzzles, but timing it against my PB or - worse - people I'm connected to on LinkedIn just wrecks the experience. I opted out of leaderboards, because I don't really want to know a guy I worked with years ago trashes me at Queens every morning.
Strong agreement that a "relax" mode is needed here - at longer word lengths its becoming a test of recall and anagram ability, and that's fun in its own right. The timer just makes it a bit "meh", and I won't be returning as a result. Shame.
This reminds me of how my wife absolutely thrives on gamification and the social competition of things like Peloton, while they destroy 100% of my interest in the thing. Weâre both intensely competitive people but in completely different ways.
Yeah I think this will be a bit too easy without a timer. But that ui does make it kind of intense, i forgot how to spell a basic word because i was thinking i only have 10 red seconds left
I guessed "LATER", but it said - wrong and mentioned "ALERT". The only fix I would make is to ensure that all possible words with scrambled characters make sense.
LATER and ALERT are both correct, for text "A E R T L"
I like the idea, but I didn't like losing after a few words. Now it might just be me not being good at losing, but who is?
Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got:
I would suggest instead of a countdown timer, use time as a score (less time used = higher score) so at least the player can advance. Also itâs no fun and extremely annoying to make the player wait 12 hours for the next challenge, which turns me off to even wanting to play again.
If you do that you could not even show the timer. Or make it more discrete or toggle its presence. For the person who wants to optimize (although tbh its not really even actionable), but otherwise remove it since its stressing people out
I got the word BAITH on like turn 5, and I only chose that because I couldn't figure anything out. I thought it was a nonsense word. But mixing in a scottish slang word in the easy section was a surprise.
Shuffle would certainly help with that. I felt like I was expending a ton of energy and time shuffling mentally (but I'll concede that if I did it enough I'd get faster at it).
I think there is probably a research paper hiding inside this game.
I couldn't guess Dice because, as an ESL person, I couldn't make the D-i combo sound like /d/+ /aÉŞ/ in my head (it sounded as /d/ + /ÉŞ/), so a part of my neural circuitry didn't fire, and I couldn't complete it with `ce.`
In other words I, personally, in this pattern recognition game rely on the way words sounds in my head to find familiar combinations and continue the sequence.
On some levels I tried guessing, starting with different letters, and still got into some local minima in my brain where I couldn't guess the word, only for it to be something obvious like 'pound'.
i've literally never heard of this, but great to pollute my brain with more of this bs.
serious question: if the majority aren't "in the know" and some minority is, and the game has literally nothing to do with sending any sekrut messages, who cares? like, is a white nationalist sitting here on HN, playing this game over a coffee and thinks, "heh, sick this is 4 numbers away from the callsign"
If an uneducated acquaintance of yours was about to name their newborn child "Adolf", would you interject that this name might not be such a great idea?
Not sure where youâre from but itâs not esoteric at all. Here in the US our current administration is constantly vice-signaling to white supremacists to maintain them as a political base, and uses myriad similar winks to do it. One example: in 2020 the Trump campaign ran Facebook ads featuring an inverted red triangle. The opening sentence was 14 words long. They ran the ad 88 times. Itâs ok to choose to be ignorant of the implications, but itâs better to maintain situational awareness.
(Iâm not saying the game needs to change its name.)
I think summarizing everybody's feedback the simplest solution is: "Game difficulty".
- Standard: what you have today
- Relaxed: 1 minute per word?
- Practice Mode: no timer whatsoever
And "Practice Mode" is a completely different mode that lets you skip questions, and instead of "you win / you lose" which is today's behavior, you end up with a score (14/18).
Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?
I do have another version where it accepts ANY word but I found it quite unsatisfying when I survived by randomly spamming combinations and finding a really obscure word.
So am currently running it against a 20,000 word wordlist instead of my larger 300,000 wordlist
I've built a some word games over the years (e.g., wordwhile.com, omiword.com), and one thing I've discovered is that players find it very unsatisfying when they enter a real, valid word and the game rejects it. I imagine that the timer would amplify that sense of unfairness.
Granted, there are also people who get annoyed when the game seems too accepting of unusual words, but if you can point them to a valid dictionary definition for that oddball word, they usually accept it without argument.
I'm one of those people who get annoyed if it's too loose. But I can just impose that restriction on myself and look down on people who rely on obscure words.
Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?
EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.
This is great. The speed aspect reminds me of the old AOL chatroom word scramble games. I personally love the timer, but I also do the newspaper anagrams without a pen, so I'm certain to be out of the majority on this.
A shuffle button would be nice (especially if it's keyboard friendly). I've found it useful for me with the NYT Spelling Bee. Sometimes my brain just gets stuck on a letter combination because two letters are close together, and the rearrangement helps.
It would be kind of fun to have an endless mode too, that just pulls words from the dictionary. Maybe not quite in line with the "daily word game" premise, but something I would personally find enjoyable.
I didn't realise at first that you could choose letters which weren't adjacent which made it very hard! Guess I've been playing too much https://zanagrams.com/ (which was also posted here recently).
I can understand the clock running out meaning a loss - but I still want to play the rest of the words? how do I do that? I don't think they are accessible anymore
Clear your cookies for the site or open incognito mode. But I agree there's no reason not to let people continue and just mark where they ended "legitimately".
Possibly the biggest difference is that 23 Words continues with the next word if you fail to get a word within 30 seconds. When you have attempted all 23 words it will present you with results like this.
Some kinds of brains must just not be good at this kind of game.
I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.
Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?
Very similar in spirit, but IMHO a lot more enjoyable than your version. It's untimed which takes the pressure off, but still a challenge because there are multiple potentially correct answers.
The on-line version doesn't seem to be working, and I don't have an android device so I can't tell if the app is still working either. But I ran this on my nexus 7 for years until it died. It was one of my favorite on-line games. I would happily pay someone to port it to ios.
I don't mind the timer as much, but I also like some of the suggested improvements here.
The only thing I really don't like, is that each puzzle can only be played once. I would like to figure out all words of a day even if it doesn't count.
This could even be an interesting statistic, how many people finished all words ignoring the time component.
I beat it! This is the first of your challenges Iâve actually completed.
Itâs coming along nicely btw, some people are saying they donât like the timer but I personally think the timer adds a lot to it. Also only being able to attempt once makes it more competitive, like if you combined hardcore minecraft and wordle. Hardcore wordle.
Using an android phone with Firefox and when I hit word #13 with 7 letters, I was unable to scroll to the right to see a hidden letter. I switched to landscape and the bottom three letters were not available not was I able to scroll down to tap them.
This was harder than I thought it would be. It's pretty fun to play!
May I suggest displaying the final result and/or ongoing progress as 18 circles/shapes that fill up depending on how far you made it?
I think loading the big wordlist (279496 words as of now) is a waste of bandwidth as you only need to load permutations of the words in the selected challenge (e.g. you don't need "ABANDONEES" if you don't have a word with those letters).
One thing you can do is store a word profile in your database, which is a string of all of the letters in the word in alphabetical order. So the word profile for 'apple' is 'aelpp'. Then you can just include all of the words that match the profiles of the real words. For example, 'quiet' and 'quite' both have the profile 'eiqtu'.
Some thoughts about the timer, since it's what everyone wants to talk about :-) --
I find that with things like this my distribution of times is extremely uneven: I get most words in a few seconds, but every now and then one comes along that for whatever reason my brain doesn't want to see and then it takes much longer. (And if that "much longer" is over the 30-second limit, too bad, I lose.)
And something about this makes playing with the timer annoying for me: I feel some combination of "surely I should get some credit for getting all those others so much quicker than the timer allows" and "oh, come on, that was just unlucky and doesn't reflect what I can generally do".
(I am not claiming that it's right to feel anything like that. Just that I do and I suspect I'm not alone.)
I wonder about a mechanic like this: the timer starts at 30 seconds; when you solve a word, rather than resetting to 30 seconds the timer increments by 10 seconds. So if you're solving in <10s on average then (at least after the first few, easier, words) you can afford to have the occasional brain failure without getting thrown out of the game. And your overall performance depends on how well you do on all the words, not how you do on the single worst one.
(I agree with others that there should also be a no-timer mode for those who just don't want to feel tested and/or stressed in that way.)
I played three games, and every time the third word for me was difficult. I bet I am not alone. Not sure it's a game I want to return to just for two first words.
Please enlighten me on how they work. My understanding is that captchas usually either involve challenges for humans or require proof of work (some computation). I found the idea of this game along the lines of a human challenge.
I'm equally laughing because I remember a coding snafu I ran into once, where we were aggressively filtering out "1488" turns out someone finally joined and "1488" was part of their user ID (auto-increment field!), and we realized maybe we shouldn't be checking the auto-increment field, not sure if it was me being too aggressive and not thinking about it, or another developer, but I did laugh once I figured out why that one user was unable to use half of the web app. This was for a gaming community based project, we had a lot of trolls come and go, and they would definitely shove these sorts of references in their usernames, and anywhere else you had custom user input.
I lost on the third word because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was, and then I restarted and got to the 18th. I'd look at the letters and just know which word it was, it was pretty odd how hard I found it the first time around versus how easy it was the second.
Thanks everyone for the feedback! Two questions
1. For a version without the timer what would you like to happen if you are just completely stuck on a word? Hints to reveal letters or skip the word?
2. For those who like the timed version would you prefer to continue when you miss a word and then get a final score out of 18?
This is not a game for me - I donât enjoy scrambled letter games in the first place, and I donât really respond to time pressure in games. That said, I donât think you should change it. Itâs conceptually clear as it is, and adding a forgiving mode would just make it wishy washy. The simplicity is appealing and it doesnât have to be for everyone!
Just a vote since I'm seeing a lot of anti-timer sentiment: I like the timer because it creates a conclusive way for the game to end, and causes me to spend a lot less time on the game, I imagine. But I also think it makes sense to have a non-timer mode. It would also be cool to have like 3 shuffles that you are allowed to use. As an exit to the non-timer mode, I think it would be fine to have an "I give up " button.
I also love the countdown. Counterintuitively it makes the game less stressful â the counter goes back to 30 no matter what. If the timer counted up, you'd constantly need to care about getting each one as fast as possible, or fret about one that's taking you minutes, etc.
With the countdown, you more want to care about the high level stuff: Keep your brain agile enough to get the next one, figure out more general patterns, ensure you "cover" the promising patterns, notice tough spots (with tons of patterns) where you you'll need to lock in. That stuff is more fun to focus on than speed.
Everyone wants to fail less, sure. It's not surprising people's feedback focuses on the mechanic that made you fail! That doesn't mean changing that bit will make the game more fun.
> If the timer counted up, you'd constantly need to care about getting each one as fast as possible, or fret about one that's taking you minutes, etc.
The timer doesnât have to be visible at all until the end.
> Everyone wants to fail less, sure.
It has nothing to do with not wanting to fail. Sometimes people just want to chill a bit or kill a few minutes with a simple word puzzle that engages your game without being stressful. This game doesnât even let you repeat the challenges you took, so to play it you always have to be highly engaged. Thatâs fine for some games, but not every game needs to be like that, and this one doesnât.
No oneâs asking timer mode to go away, or even become the default, just to have the alternative option.
I also like the timer. Eventually Iâd like to do other things and the timer ends the games.
> 2. For those who like the timed version would you prefer to continue when you miss a word and then get a final score out of 18?
Absolutely, I had to reopen it a bunch of times in incognito to make it to the end xD
Very fun!
I'm totally fine with the way it works, because, well, it's a game, losing should be losing. I mean, I kinda want to continue, but I'm glad I'm not allowed to. I didn't make it. There will be another chance tomorrow.
But I'd like to propose allowing keyboard input. Losing because of your mouse skills in a pattern recognition game is annoying.
Keyboard input should work!
I wondered about this because I used a keyboard to do it. But then I thought maybe krick used mobile and there's no onscreen keyboard. But then I realized that krick said mouse skills and so is probably on a desktop. I think maybe just some graphical indicator that you can type would be helpful for first time users.
No, I did try to type, but nothing happened. I seem to remember I did check that I had English layout turned on, but maybe I actually didn't. Really cannot guess any better than that what might have been the problem.
Anyway, doesn't matter, it was totally my mistake, everything works for me as well as for everyone else.
My bad. Indeed it does. Not sure what was the problem for me the first time.
If you're not set on a "survival mode" design, could you design it as counting up instead of counting down? And maybe showing a "par" time, that way players can opt into the challenge vs. just a morning brainteaser.
Complete gut reaction to your first question, my preference would be two fold: 1. An option to start the game in timeless mode 2. When I fail a word, prior to showing me the word, give me the option to enter timeless mode for the rest of the run, such that it doesn't ruin the current round, and that run is now excluded
As for the second, that's more suggestive and I don't care as much either way. Personally me for me I've just been going down the archive trying each day. I enjoy competitive games, so once I miss a word I don't have much interest in continuing on.
Iâd prefer a timer, but when it runs out of time, you just donât get credit for the word.
You click next and it goes to the next word.
I donât want hints but I can see how others might want that. But you still donât get credit for hints. Or it shows âx hints usedâ
Final score can show that you got the first N words in <30s (as it is now), and you can have other stats:
* Total number of consecutive words (even if over time)
* Total number of words
* total words <30 seconds
* Plus whatever hint based metrics you want
I'd prefer a mode where you fail the word, but can continue to the next word.
Perhaps it is intentionally part of the design, but being a bit of a perfectionist, I failed a couple of times, and found that actually the longer words were (often) easier than the shorter ones...
1. keep the timer counting up
2. add a multiplier depending on the number of seconds until solved. [30s / [taken]s = score
3. add button to give upSomeone replied with "survival mode" which is a great way to phrase it.
Maybe a few different modes? How many can you get out of 18, how long can you last (unlimited), and just a chilled relaxed mode.
I would like a chance to play a puzzle I failed on to just practice what comes next. I don't need rewards or anything after the initial fail.
Fun game, thanks for sharing!
Yeah, when you fail, maybe it could offer a "continue playing" option? Then you can still finish the words, but it doesn't add to your score.
Same! I did it by using private browser windows, this way I could see all the words.
I tried with a private browser and it didn't work the second time i did it, which is crazy to me. Came to ask how they did that?
1. Yes, hints, like maybe the position of a random letter, then another, etc. The game could allow you to "buy" more letters with your existing score (and maybe an initial amount: everyone starts at, say, 36?)
2. Yes being able to continue would be great, it's frustrating that the game just stops.
Great work anyway!
I don't think you need any non-timer version. The archive is there for people to play more.
Some suggestions people have made around being able to shuffle or place letters - maybe. But the game is pretty perfect as it is.
I like the timer but just give the option - play with timer (pro), play without timer (relax). split the results as well.
1. You can have a button for both.
2. Yes
3. I got stuck and couldn't get past RILGUN -- it'd be nice to know what the word you were going for actually was.
>I got stuck and couldn't get past RILGUN -- it'd be nice to know what the word you were going for actually was.
i think there is only two valid words: luring and ruling.
As someone who definitely gets worked up when thereâs a timer (still got all 18; top 1% really? Might be good to show a rough number of total players), I donât really get it without a timer.
I am with the people asking for a scramble/ shuffle button. I have to do anagrams all the time in cryptic crosswords and sometimes it requires seeing things in a totally different order to unlock the answer.
According to my analytics only 32 people out of 12,145 got all 18 in todays puzzle so far!
2. Yes! Allow continue for no score after timeout
1. I'd prefer to reveal letters ... each press of the hint button reveals the position of one random letter.
2. I don't have a preference.
Very cool and well done.
I'd probably rather it just tell me the answer and give the option to continue :)
I'd like more common words?
"Baith" is incredibly esoteric.
"Habit" is another anagram you could have used, and not esoteric.
i did "habit"
Careful taking advice from nerds over-complicating things, it's beautiful as-is. Maybe have it be 7s per letter instead of a fixed 30s.
Oftentimes feedback is useful to address a complaint. âLots of people are frustrated with Xâ is great signal. The solution might not be (but certainly sometimes is) the fixes they recommend; but the pain theyâre expressing is real.
Those are all good options.
Also a version in which your unused time is accumulated for future rounds would be interesting
The timer is OK, IMHO, but longer words should give you more time to guess. Makes little sense to give people 30 seconds to guess both a four-letter and a seven-letter word.
That would also let you scale to any arbitrary word length.
Do something so you don't lose on time while "typing" the solution!
Adding a second for each letter you type is a crude version.
Donât reset to 30s for each word. Just add 30s (or 20s). So if I am fast in the early rounds, I am rewarded in later rounds by having 1:43 to work on a word I am completely stuck on.
The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and Iâm not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. Iâve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game.
If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Relax Mode vs. Challenge Mode.
By the way: I really like the overall design of Zanagrams and 18 Words. These are small puzzle games with very simple, clean UIs. They work crisply and I've noticed you've been tidying up Zanagrams, adding minor features and settings. They have a very Classic Web feel to them. It's not like you're trying to get me to watch ads or subscribe to your newsletter or are just breadcrumbs to some for-profit thing. I like having a handful of very easy to pick up puzzles/toys when I need to fidget. They help keep me away from TikToks and Shorts.
I think Zach Gage (developer of excellent games including Really Bad Chess, Spelltower, etc) says on Adam Conover's podcast that for many people they have difficulty improving at a skill when they have time (or other) pressure
Thus, he always includes a relaxed mode to let someone practice without any stress. Incidentally, he realized that some people only ever play in the relaxed mode!
The timer kills this for me too.
Maybe if it counted up I would be less annoyed by it. I like how the NYT does it with their crossword app. If you complete it under some threshold you get a gold star but there's no upper limit on the time.
The Zanagrams game, which AFACK is from the same developer (?), actually does this - it counts up like a stopwatch, then compares your time to the global average at the end.
I much prefer this way, personally at least.
Having a timer is maybe not so much the problem, but there's no reward here for doing early words quickly and no appreciation for the fact that difficulty is not linear. Would be nice if you could bank up some time for when harder ones come.
I will try out a game with a timer, but it will never be a keeper.
I'd probably say there instead of a Challenge Mode and a Relax Mode like you said, it could just be a combined mode where there is a timer but after it goes out it simply continues the game on Relax Mode.
Or alternatively every word still has the timer and then at the end if you finish, it tells you how many words you completed under the timer and gives you a score based on that.
And then maybe an option for those who don't want the timer to show at all, since maybe it adds a bit of pressure. You can have just a simple option that removes the timer entirely from view
Another idea: maybe time how long you take for each word, and for the competitive among us, show stats on how long you took compared to everyone else, and a leaderboard for who took the least total time.
Agree on the timer.
In one sense I really enjoy the timer up to the point that I lose, but it feels very unsatisfactory, especially if I lose early, & I'm acutely aware the difficulty level it's set at will be experienced radically differently by different players (to the exclusion of most I would imagine).
Having a timerless mode is very much needed as an option - there's no real risk of "cheating" with these cookie-based browser games anyway since I could just have infinite retries in a private tab if I felt like doing that.
100% agree. Casual mode would be a winner.
Yea, the timer is a little stressful though I understand the purpose/design behind it. I do like the suggestion of the no timer or a relaxed mode with.
PS anyone have any other fun, simple games like this and Zanagrams? I found https://maptap.gg/ recently and that also gives me the same Classic Web feeling that OP mentioned.
Yeah screw the timer. I can't work under pressure like that when it comes to word games. Maybe other people will enjoy that, but not me.
Itâs the same reason people will instantly close a site with unwanted animations (ads).
But if this game was called âDo A Word Puzzle While Being Distracted By Animated Numbers in Your Peripheral Visionâ, that would be alright.
Yep, instead of feeling like a fun puzzle the timer just adds unnecessary pressure and gets me really annoyed.
My guy thatâs the whole point of the game. Otherwise itâs too easy
You can still be competitive in "casual mode" using total time used to solve all the words.
I just want to chill... I have plenty of stress in my life already.
Not everyone plays games for purposeless dumb challenges and difficulty. Games are supposed to be fun. Sometimes you just want to chill and engage the brain at a leisurely pace.
> purposeless dumb challenges and difficulty
While I agree that for some people games with a time limit are not fun, I don't think the challenges and difficulty should be classified as "purposeless" and "dumb". For many the challenge/difficulty IS the fun part, and they serve a genuine purpose. If you don't like that, then play a different game, but that doesn't mean the game you don't like is useless.
Right. I donât mean every challenge and difficulty is purposeless and dumb, just that those donât have to be the goal, and that sometimes an easy game is what you want.
Tangentially, I have noticed some of the most well-balanced difficult games I have ever played were the ones with very granular difficulty settings. Examples include CrossCode and Celeste. Crypt of the Necrodancer too, though the customisation there feels like it crosses into too granular. In each I changed the difficulty settings exactly once, for optional challenges, and it made the games way more enjoyable.
Yeah. It's just a walk to the mailbox for my brain.
i like the timer.
BUT i'd like it if each round started with letters hidden and timer paused in case i need to step away and redirect my attention to something else.
All games should have the option to have the timer turned off.
I regularly do cryptic crosswords (so this sort of game is in my wheelhouse). My goal is to complete the puzzle, not do so in a particular time. Completing it is often hard (depending on which paper I've picked up). There is no timer when I'm say with paper and pen, so it baffles me that every online newspaper cryptic has a timer on by default, and in some cases it can't be disabled.
It's also the thing that "ruined" the LinkedIn puzzles for me. They're generally fun puzzles, but timing it against my PB or - worse - people I'm connected to on LinkedIn just wrecks the experience. I opted out of leaderboards, because I don't really want to know a guy I worked with years ago trashes me at Queens every morning.
Strong agreement that a "relax" mode is needed here - at longer word lengths its becoming a test of recall and anagram ability, and that's fun in its own right. The timer just makes it a bit "meh", and I won't be returning as a result. Shame.
Same. Stopped after two words. Gave me the same feeling as taking a timed software developer screening.
English is not my native tongue. If I had a relaxed mode, that'd be awesome :)
> it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk.
Or maybe donât even keep score. Thatâs one of the features which makes be skip these daily games. Not every game needs to be a competition!
This reminds me of how my wife absolutely thrives on gamification and the social competition of things like Peloton, while they destroy 100% of my interest in the thing. Weâre both intensely competitive people but in completely different ways.
I would appreciate the timer not turning red. It's better to be surprised that time's up, rather than be surprised to know it's running out.
Yeah I think this will be a bit too easy without a timer. But that ui does make it kind of intense, i forgot how to spell a basic word because i was thinking i only have 10 red seconds left
BUG:
I guessed "LATER", but it said - wrong and mentioned "ALERT". The only fix I would make is to ensure that all possible words with scrambled characters make sense.
LATER and ALERT are both correct, for text "A E R T L"
One of my winning words was âBAITHâ which google tells me is scottish haha. Is this intentional OP?
Oh it was supposed to be HabitâŚ
Would be nice to have a âscramble!â button so it makes it slightly easier when we get stuck
That would be nice!
The ones I get stuck on are so obvious once the word is revealed that just a reshuffle of the letters would help.
Maybe give the player 3 chances to re-scramble the letters.
I like the idea, but I didn't like losing after a few words. Now it might just be me not being good at losing, but who is?
Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got:
|X|o|X|X|X|o|o|o|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|o|X| 13/18
Yeah, but also, is it really "18 words" if you don't get there?
I would suggest instead of a countdown timer, use time as a score (less time used = higher score) so at least the player can advance. Also itâs no fun and extremely annoying to make the player wait 12 hours for the next challenge, which turns me off to even wanting to play again.
If you do that you could not even show the timer. Or make it more discrete or toggle its presence. For the person who wants to optimize (although tbh its not really even actionable), but otherwise remove it since its stressing people out
I got the word BAITH on like turn 5, and I only chose that because I couldn't figure anything out. I thought it was a nonsense word. But mixing in a scottish slang word in the easy section was a surprise.
I guess HABIT was the expected one here.
Baith was right. But I feel stupid that I couldnt see Habit.
Shuffle would certainly help with that. I felt like I was expending a ton of energy and time shuffling mentally (but I'll concede that if I did it enough I'd get faster at it).
I think there is probably a research paper hiding inside this game.
I couldn't guess Dice because, as an ESL person, I couldn't make the D-i combo sound like /d/+ /aÉŞ/ in my head (it sounded as /d/ + /ÉŞ/), so a part of my neural circuitry didn't fire, and I couldn't complete it with `ce.`
In other words I, personally, in this pattern recognition game rely on the way words sounds in my head to find familiar combinations and continue the sequence.
On some levels I tried guessing, starting with different letters, and still got into some local minima in my brain where I couldn't guess the word, only for it to be something obvious like 'pound'.
This name is dangerously close to "14 Words", a white nationalist creed, which carries certain connotations to Americans in the know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
i've literally never heard of this, but great to pollute my brain with more of this bs.
serious question: if the majority aren't "in the know" and some minority is, and the game has literally nothing to do with sending any sekrut messages, who cares? like, is a white nationalist sitting here on HN, playing this game over a coffee and thinks, "heh, sick this is 4 numbers away from the callsign"
If an uneducated acquaintance of yours was about to name their newborn child "Adolf", would you interject that this name might not be such a great idea?
Absolutely, itâs an act of kindness to loop them in. And if an eavesdropper complains about it Iâd be super suspicious.
there's a big difference between Adolf and whatever esoteric garbage this is
Not sure where youâre from but itâs not esoteric at all. Here in the US our current administration is constantly vice-signaling to white supremacists to maintain them as a political base, and uses myriad similar winks to do it. One example: in 2020 the Trump campaign ran Facebook ads featuring an inverted red triangle. The opening sentence was 14 words long. They ran the ad 88 times. Itâs ok to choose to be ignorant of the implications, but itâs better to maintain situational awareness.
(Iâm not saying the game needs to change its name.)
I loved it, i hated it. I'm so bad at this.
I think summarizing everybody's feedback the simplest solution is: "Game difficulty".
- Standard: what you have today
- Relaxed: 1 minute per word?
- Practice Mode: no timer whatsoever
And "Practice Mode" is a completely different mode that lets you skip questions, and instead of "you win / you lose" which is today's behavior, you end up with a score (14/18).
Whats a good strategy for when you just donât see it? Trying to think of a way to make incremental progress.
Pretty frustrating when you find a word, but it's not THE word. Pretty fun otherwise.
tbh this should accept all dictionary matches
Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?
I do have another version where it accepts ANY word but I found it quite unsatisfying when I survived by randomly spamming combinations and finding a really obscure word.
So am currently running it against a 20,000 word wordlist instead of my larger 300,000 wordlist
The third one in the archive wouldn't accept "tase" or "sate" for "seat".
I've built a some word games over the years (e.g., wordwhile.com, omiword.com), and one thing I've discovered is that players find it very unsatisfying when they enter a real, valid word and the game rejects it. I imagine that the timer would amplify that sense of unfairness.
Granted, there are also people who get annoyed when the game seems too accepting of unusual words, but if you can point them to a valid dictionary definition for that oddball word, they usually accept it without argument.
I'm one of those people who get annoyed if it's too loose. But I can just impose that restriction on myself and look down on people who rely on obscure words.
On today's puzzle, `WROGHT` was rejected, and I got `GROWTH` just in the nick of time.
Is that actually a word, or were you thinking of "wrought"?
The word is âwroughtâ, which is why it wasnât accepted.
Going two days back in the archive, "egret" not allowed
"braze" is a very common word, especially if you like bicycles.
Definitely not any less valid or unsatisfying than "zebra".
I would argue it's less satisfying. I like bikes and I still had to look it up.
Ok yes all good examples. Have reverted back ot the large dictionary for now which accepts all these
just tried that same archive puzzle and it accepted braze for me
Why not just only allow a single try, but accept any "real" word?
Interesting idea but too many people mistype / mispell on first attempt (mostly me)
the obvious solution is to not use the words that have an obscure word as anagram. I failed on 'target' because I went for 'regatta'.
> I failed on âtargetâ because I went for âregattaâ.
Given that those two donât have the same letters, isnât that the expected outcome?
Haha oops, you're right :)
That seems only fair. ;-)
quite/quiet
Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?
EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.
300,000? The Oxford dictionary only contains 171,000!
I guess the wordlist with 300k contains all the different forms a word can have while the 171k count is only the base words.
Haha yeah the 300k list contains so really obscure stuff
This is great. The speed aspect reminds me of the old AOL chatroom word scramble games. I personally love the timer, but I also do the newspaper anagrams without a pen, so I'm certain to be out of the majority on this.
A shuffle button would be nice (especially if it's keyboard friendly). I've found it useful for me with the NYT Spelling Bee. Sometimes my brain just gets stuck on a letter combination because two letters are close together, and the rearrangement helps.
It would be kind of fun to have an endless mode too, that just pulls words from the dictionary. Maybe not quite in line with the "daily word game" premise, but something I would personally find enjoyable.
I didn't realise at first that you could choose letters which weren't adjacent which made it very hard! Guess I've been playing too much https://zanagrams.com/ (which was also posted here recently).
My other game! Thanks for playing
I can understand the clock running out meaning a loss - but I still want to play the rest of the words? how do I do that? I don't think they are accessible anymore
A continue that let's you keep playing would be fun. Or maybe different modes (eg hard vs normal)
Clear your cookies for the site or open incognito mode. But I agree there's no reason not to let people continue and just mark where they ended "legitimately".
https://wordnerd.co/23words/ is similar (but 23 words instead of 18).
Possibly the biggest difference is that 23 Words continues with the next word if you fail to get a word within 30 seconds. When you have attempted all 23 words it will present you with results like this.
Some kinds of brains must just not be good at this kind of game.
I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.
Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?
I think I get anchored too easily based on what my brain sees in the scrambled letters.
A re-scramble button would do wonders for me like in that Spelling Bee game on NYTimes.
You should take a look at this:
https://www.uptoplay.net/wordiest-online-game/com.concretero...
Very similar in spirit, but IMHO a lot more enjoyable than your version. It's untimed which takes the pressure off, but still a challenge because there are multiple potentially correct answers.
The on-line version doesn't seem to be working, and I don't have an android device so I can't tell if the app is still working either. But I ran this on my nexus 7 for years until it died. It was one of my favorite on-line games. I would happily pay someone to port it to ios.
This is so much more fun than those dumb word games on linkedin
I don't mind the timer as much, but I also like some of the suggested improvements here.
The only thing I really don't like, is that each puzzle can only be played once. I would like to figure out all words of a day even if it doesn't count.
This could even be an interesting statistic, how many people finished all words ignoring the time component.
This game helped me realise I'm a doofus 10/10
I beat it! This is the first of your challenges Iâve actually completed.
Itâs coming along nicely btw, some people are saying they donât like the timer but I personally think the timer adds a lot to it. Also only being able to attempt once makes it more competitive, like if you combined hardcore minecraft and wordle. Hardcore wordle.
I failed on the last one, I wish I could've gone into "extra time" to keep guessing even if it didn't contribute to my score.
Love the sleek UI.
Forgive the shameless plug. Here is my word game which only features words from programming and compsci.
https://7coderwords.kenamick.com
Fun game though I wish it left more time for the longer words, also wish we could have the letters in one line and shuffle them
Using an android phone with Firefox and when I hit word #13 with 7 letters, I was unable to scroll to the right to see a hidden letter. I switched to landscape and the bottom three letters were not available not was I able to scroll down to tap them.
Wow I suck! Played today's and a few others, and got ~4-6/18. I like the timer.
For 4 letters it's enough time to guess, but I have no idea what they mean: 'Doby', 'Etas'
This a good game. Itâs fun, simple and quick. Itâs self explanatory and clear what you need to do.
The UI is almost perfect, itâs seamless on mobile and desktop.
I made some criticism in other comments therefore I also wanted to make a comment saying what I liked.
This was harder than I thought it would be. It's pretty fun to play! May I suggest displaying the final result and/or ongoing progress as 18 circles/shapes that fill up depending on how far you made it?
Was this by chance inspired by a previous submission (now defunct) that had a similar premise?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536488
Edit: I believe it was transferred to a new domain at https://wordnerd.co/
Something about not being able to shuffle the tiles makes this hard for me.
Itâd be fun to get to try all the words. Maybe finishing the whole game as fast as possible could be the goal, rather than hitting 30s per word?
I didnât realize the word âcrowdâ only had one vowel until I saw it scrambled!
And I didn't realize "audio" had only one consonant!
I think loading the big wordlist (279496 words as of now) is a waste of bandwidth as you only need to load permutations of the words in the selected challenge (e.g. you don't need "ABANDONEES" if you don't have a word with those letters).
Very true and it's a bit lazy.
I'm load a short wordlist first and then the longer version async so it doesn't really affect how long until you can start playing.
Waste of bandwidth is true. Cloudflare pages hates me
One thing you can do is store a word profile in your database, which is a string of all of the letters in the word in alphabetical order. So the word profile for 'apple' is 'aelpp'. Then you can just include all of the words that match the profiles of the real words. For example, 'quiet' and 'quite' both have the profile 'eiqtu'.
Very cool. As a linguist (not a native English speaker, but highly trained), I love it a lot.
Love the pressure due to the timer, and the best aid to help is say it aloud.
Damn fun and challenging
Congrats! This looks like a daily one for me
This is really fun, love the idea! I agree with the others, a chill/practice mode would be great.
Some thoughts about the timer, since it's what everyone wants to talk about :-) --
I find that with things like this my distribution of times is extremely uneven: I get most words in a few seconds, but every now and then one comes along that for whatever reason my brain doesn't want to see and then it takes much longer. (And if that "much longer" is over the 30-second limit, too bad, I lose.)
And something about this makes playing with the timer annoying for me: I feel some combination of "surely I should get some credit for getting all those others so much quicker than the timer allows" and "oh, come on, that was just unlucky and doesn't reflect what I can generally do".
(I am not claiming that it's right to feel anything like that. Just that I do and I suspect I'm not alone.)
I wonder about a mechanic like this: the timer starts at 30 seconds; when you solve a word, rather than resetting to 30 seconds the timer increments by 10 seconds. So if you're solving in <10s on average then (at least after the first few, easier, words) you can afford to have the occasional brain failure without getting thrown out of the game. And your overall performance depends on how well you do on all the words, not how you do on the single worst one.
(I agree with others that there should also be a no-timer mode for those who just don't want to feel tested and/or stressed in that way.)
I havenât been able to post anything at all, so I donât even know what itâs like to make a post.
I like the time based ness. 30 seconds is plenty of time and one run a day is a nice change of pace from never ending feeds.
Good job, I got 15/18
nice game to start my day. a refresh button to reorder the letter would be great.
When I didn't know the word I just mashed the given letters on the keyboard randomly, sometimes I got lucky with it
Maybe the game should limit the number of tries per word?
one thing I noticed playing this:
way easier with fingers on the keyboard (vs selecting characters with mouse)
just typing out seemingly possible words per muscle memory / subconscious impulse
Could I have the source code so I can plug in the Polish word list? It would make a great training app for Scrabble.
Yeah its just the single index.html file feel free to download it and adapt
You could also probably one-shot your own version of this using any SOTA LLM, it's not terribly complicated (but a nice game idea!).
It's unobfuscated. Right click, view source, there it is.
Just one shot in Claude if you have it or deepseek flash for free.
That was really fun. Made it to 16/18. Thank you popmpomsheep.
Thanks for playing!
Pretty cool idea. I think a calendar based UI to go through the archives would be more user friendly than what you have right now.
Yeah for sure I agree just kept it simple for now but will improve if people like it
Nicely done. A shuffle letters button would be nice.
I played three games, and every time the third word for me was difficult. I bet I am not alone. Not sure it's a game I want to return to just for two first words.
iPhone bug: double tapping on a letter zooms in the viewport with no way to zoom back out, permanently breaking the page.
Oof yeah thanks! Fixed now
Fun! But disappointing if you lose early. Maybe let the player continue after failing and showing a final score out of 18.
Made it to 9 and then time ran out... I wish it showed me the word that I got stuck on! Argh!!!
It should have shown you!
This is a lot of fun lol. Well done!
This is fun! Could use a short "how it works" blurb on the landing page though :)
Thanks! I thought it was fun to throw people straight into the game without instructions but you think it too unclear?
I did get the first one straight away, so it's not too unclear, but it did induce a short moment of panic, which I'm not sure I'd categorise as fun :P
This could be a cool captcha challenge (without the timer).
That's not how captchas work...
Please enlighten me on how they work. My understanding is that captchas usually either involve challenges for humans or require proof of work (some computation). I found the idea of this game along the lines of a human challenge.
Fun, that's it. New addiction after daily wordle unlocked
Embarrassed of where I failed (#8). Very cool game though!
If it makes you feel better, I failed on #3. In my defense, I'm running on 2 hours of sleep.
wow, addictive
great game, what do you think of adding shuffle?
Nice, this is pretty fun!
Great game, well done
what made you go with 18?
It's the standard number of holes in a golf course
Not the parent, but I just checked and it seems that all $iwords.com are taken for i<18
14 was taken.
I see what you did there. I did a double take when I saw this on the front page of HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
Haha I've never heard of this but lucky i went with 18
I'm equally laughing because I remember a coding snafu I ran into once, where we were aggressively filtering out "1488" turns out someone finally joined and "1488" was part of their user ID (auto-increment field!), and we realized maybe we shouldn't be checking the auto-increment field, not sure if it was me being too aggressive and not thinking about it, or another developer, but I did laugh once I figured out why that one user was unable to use half of the web app. This was for a gaming community based project, we had a lot of trolls come and go, and they would definitely shove these sorts of references in their usernames, and anywhere else you had custom user input.
The internet is a magical place.
Ha fun little game :)
For some reason it made me think of this right away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
timer removed should be better
"Baith" ? That's a pretty niche word I'd say.
This was habit but baith was accepted as well
Damn got to 13.
Fun game!
I got stuck on the word corner of all words. Ugh
LAMER is a real word and COLOR is not.
Depends on which side of the pond (or Canadian border?) you're on ;)
> COLOR is not
Huh? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/color
I lost on the third word because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was, and then I restarted and got to the 18th. I'd look at the letters and just know which word it was, it was pretty odd how hard I found it the first time around versus how easy it was the second.
I'm normally terrible at anagrams.
holy shit this is hard
4/18
Enjoying time-based games must be some prey animal adaptation, y'all are probably vegan and have negative canthal tilt.
Skill issue
haha yes. I got 2 and it said come back in 9hours. LOL. Ain't nobody got time for that.
lol