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?

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.

The timer doesn’t 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 doesn’t even let you repeat the challenges you took, so to play it you always have to be highly engaged. That’s fine for some games, but not every game needs to be like that, and this one doesn’t.

No one’s asking timer mode to go away, or even become the default, just to have the alternative option.

So a timer needs to either accept that a lot of interested parties will be turned off by it - or must be designed in a more accommodating way.

2. Yes being able to continue would be great, it's frustrating that the game just stops.

Great work anyway!

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.

^parent's #2 tip is great too, as I was sad to cut the fun short when I couldn't guess EXAMPLE today.

Just minor notes though really. The game was fun and seemed nice and polished. And obviously allowing playing using the keyboard was a great idea that I appreciated.

But I'd like to propose allowing keyboard input. Losing because of your mouse skills in a pattern recognition game is annoying.

Anyway, doesn't matter, it was totally my mistake, everything works for me as well as for everyone else.

You click next and it goes to the next word.

I don’t want hints but I can see how others might want that. But you still don’t get credit for hints. Or it shows “x hints used”

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

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...

Fun game, thanks for sharing!

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.

Some suggestions people have made around being able to shuffle or place letters - maybe. But the game is pretty perfect as it is.

2. add a multiplier depending on the number of seconds until solved. [30s / [taken]s = score

    eg.: 10s solution gives x3 score 
         30s = 1 score (1x1)
         40s = 0.75
         60s 0.5

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 think there is only two valid words: luring and ruling.

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.

"Baith" is incredibly esoteric.

2. I don't have a preference.

Very cool and well done.

Also a version in which your unused time is accumulated for future rounds would be interesting

Also, maybe having a button (and also a key press) to randomly rearrange the letters, or allow me to drag them around to try to figure it out... like I'd do with scrabble tiles on my rack.

Adding a second for each letter you type is a crude version.

That would also let you scale to any arbitrary word length.

Absolutely, I had to reopen it a bunch of times in incognito to make it to the end xD

Very fun!

a) the timer would be cumulative, so that solving the early words faster gives more time for the harder words,

b) going negative wouldn't end the game, it would just turn the time red or something, with the goal being to finish all of the words with the highest time-remaining possible, rather than just to win/lose.

And at the end there is a “used a hint” badge or not.

I really like everyone's idea of finding some way of letting the player play all 18 words. Either count up time, and use total time as the score (while allowing pausing). Or else just count the total score at the end, and if someone fails a word it's reduced from the score. So you got 16/18 word or something.

I immediately liked the game and was inspired to try multiple days,

my single biggest frustration was that once a day is attempted, it's locked, and, you can't continue after a single failure.

The "single point of failure" having heavy consequences would likely make me bounce off and not return.

Might I suggest an alternate design to try:

Keep the incentive to speed, but reduce the punishment.

Proposal:

Score is points-per-word as a function of time to complete.

With a non-linear asymptomic point curve.

Bonus for very fast, long tail decreasing from 1.x points to 0.x, after 30s you get 0 points...

...but critically you are not loocked out of the game and can take as long as you like.

Bonus for caching this state so you can return later

There are variations, e.g. a total time budget for all words... perhaps you retain a sense of tier, with players able to select a "league" which gives higher reward for fastest responses but more quickly drops you to zero for the rest of the game...

You can still have a leader board (implicit or explicit) where points are fungible.

You could even then have a "no stress" league which gives a flat 0.25 points per success with no timer at all or something.

Just reduce the final score, as someone else here also suggested, but I'd like to at least always get to try all 18 words.

I also like some of the comments about the non-timed version to just chill and play without stress. Having a back catalog of timer-less puzzles would be a fun way to use my brain and kill some time.

I would like the option to continue when you miss a word, but I also like the "miss a word and it's over" nature for the actual daily game.

You're not going to please everyone here. You might simply need to let the player pick a difficulty level, for example:

- Relaxed - No timer, keep going when you miss / Hurried - Timer, keep going when you miss / Rush - Timer, stops when you miss (default daily)

I think you really have something here! I love word games, and a new one that I would play daily doesn't come along often. Nice job!

The timer adds more pressure and excitement.

Really simple and slick game - well done OP and congrats on the launch!

Maybe distinguish perfect/timely runs with the "trophy" you mention, or a "rank" from a scale (Bracket City's [0] "offices in a hypothetical city government" scale is cute). Or even a simple daily score. But I prefer to complete the daily puzzle even if I don't do it perfectly—and I find that "streak" oddly motivating despite myself. I dunno: "completed" and "completed perfectly" are two different flavors of reinforcement, both motivating.

As it is now, it feels like the game is punishing me for getting stuck on a single early puzzle, by withholding the other X puzzles in the set. And I feel like a consequence is that the game doesn't have a fixed "serving size" in my mind: it's either a 30-second single-clue game, or a 9-minute 18-clue game, and I don't know going in whether I'm getting the single cracker or the full afternoon tea today. I have to make 9 minutes of potential time for it, but I might only get 30 seconds of fun if I screw up.

As to your question 1), I'd like to see two things:

* A "shuffle" button. Often rearranging the letters helps me see it. I feel like I should be able to hit shuffle as much as I want with no cost in terms of the game mechanic--kind of analogous to playing with my (physical) Scrabble tiles.

* As far as a more helpful/"costly" chickening-out for when you're stumped and ready to give up... With Bracket City fresh on my mind, I like their approach with a single, progressive "help" mechanic. Hit it once, you get the first letter; hit it again, you reveal the full word and move right on (at some cost to your score, but blunting the disappointment by immediately giving you the fresh energy of the next clue).

[0] https://bracket.city , now at The Atlantic Magazine. Bonus feature I didn't know about until recently: they have a public-facing puzzle builder ("suburb builder") at https://builder.bracket.city . Thank you @brgross! [1]

[1] Bracket City's Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43160542

My vote would be no countdown, but you could have a hidden timer and use that for ranking at the end, so that there's still and incentive to think fast.

If you can have infinite time on each turn, then I think hints may not be as required.

-1pt for timer running out.

-1pt for 1 letter hint.

-1pt for 2 letter hint.

-1pt for skip (only available after the above).

That should let players aim for top points, but still feel like they get some reward for figuring it out, and keeps players in the game even if they can't figure one word out.

I'd keep the timer but make it an hour. I like its simplicity; I'd keep it without hints.

Be careful about applying all these complaints and suggestions. Most people here aren’t game designers.

What you have is quite successful (timer, losing, red countdown at 10 seconds, etc.). Unusually so. Too many changes could ruin it.

I suggest real testing with players of any tweaks, or having a completely separate mode where you test something more casual.

Otherwise touch nothing about the current game and give it time to gain popularity.

Nice game!

Instead of just revealing letters when completely stuck, it would be cool to get a hint showing where or how the word is used.

Also, on completion or failure, instead of immediately loading the next challenge, it would be great to have an option to 'learn more' about the word and its usage. It would be amazing for learning new words, and you can just add a 'next' button for those who want to keep playing!

and the whole thing is timed counting up, and how long it took is the score.

the way it is now with a countdown timer for each word, the player doesn't get a reward for solving something quickly

So I would say No to #1 and yes to #2.

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.

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!

[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/choking_radio/

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.

I much prefer this way, personally at least.

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

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.

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.

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.

But if this game was called “Do A Word Puzzle While Being Distracted By Animated Numbers in Your Peripheral Vision”, that would be alright.

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.

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.

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.

Or maybe don’t even keep score. That’s one of the features which makes be skip these daily games. Not every game needs to be a competition!

I completely agree. If this didn’t have the timer (or maybe if it were counting up in the corner) it could be a great addition to our collection of games.

I grew up with this: https://youtu.be/UaOLkwtG-Ak?t=12 If anything it should be more intense and have music!

Not enough reward in the mechanics, I played about 50% of the archive games and each was the same. A feeling a frantic pressure and an inability to hit the 18 words every time (i.e. I lost)

Maybe I'm just too slow, but I feel like a good game should cater for players of mixed ability. This one seems stuck in pro / turbo mode and left me feeling frustrated - which is the only thing really thats stopped me bookmarking it or sharing with my family.

Edit to add - Boggle also has a timer and puts you pressure. But there's multiple paths through the grid which means your less likely to hit a brick wall and also allows for small side wins that help you along (e.g oh there's another three letter word when I am really looking for a 5 or 6).

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.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

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"

But you gotta admit it’s strange that some mass murders are off limits but not others. Joseph, mao, osama. It’s mostly about preexisting popularity.

So it's about as esoteric as white nationalism is. For example, members of the current US administration know it/believe it.

(I’m not saying the game needs to change its name.)

Do you think this cute little word game is white nationalist? Do white nationalists have claim on all "(number) words" names?

> All the symbols depicted here must be evaluated in the context in which they appear. Few symbols represent just one idea or are used exclusively by one group. For example, 100% is often used as an amount or an expression and it is also used by some by some white supremacists as shorthand for "100% white."

I couldn't guess Dice because, as an ESL person, I couldn't make the D-i combo sound like /d/+ /aɪ/ in my head (it sounded as /d/ + /ɪ/), 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.

Couldn't figure out "binding" because in the process of permuting the letters it got sounded out as "bin ding" which I immediately rejected as "not a word". It seems like it's intuitive to permute letters but I forget that you have to permute the sound too, otherwise it won't parse as a word.

My wife missed that word, and it said the correct word was “habit”.

I also did “baith” (for the same reason as OP), and ended up making it to 16, but I feel like I shouldn’t have, since I’ve never heard of “baith”. I was confused when it accepted it.

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?

A re-scramble button would do wonders for me like in that Spelling Bee game on NYTimes.

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).

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.

    You found 21/23 words
    
    Top 7% of players today.

I'm pretty sure it didn't used to continue after getting one wrong.

I played it and the other word nerd games every day for a few months, but eventually they get repetitive, which I suppose any generated game will.

You're right, it changed a few months ago. I find it more enjoyable now that you can continue to the end.

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.

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.

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

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.

Definitely not any less valid or unsatisfying than "zebra".

Given that those two don’t have the same letters, isn’t that the expected outcome?

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.

Forgive the shameless plug. Here is my word game which only features words from programming and compsci.

https://7coderwords.kenamick.com

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.

It’s coming along nicely btw, some people are saying they don’t 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.

For 4 letters it's enough time to guess, but I have no idea what they mean: 'Doby', 'Etas'

Congrats! This looks like a daily one for me

The UI is almost perfect, it’s seamless on mobile and desktop.

I made some criticism in other comments therefore I also wanted to make a comment saying what I liked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536488

Edit: I believe it was transferred to a new domain at https://wordnerd.co/

Love the pressure due to the timer, and the best aid to help is say it aloud.

vs.

vowel-vowel-consonant-vowel-vowel

Fascinating!

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

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.)

Good job, I got 15/18

way easier with fingers on the keyboard (vs selecting characters with mouse)

just typing out seemingly possible words per muscle memory / subconscious impulse

My theory is that if there's a small but non-trivial chance for our brains to for some reason fail to recognize a word, stringing together enough of them in a row will end up causing most people to suddenly have that moment out of nowhere. It kind of reminded me of that episode of Friends with the bit about writing down all 50 states in a certain amount of time; perfect consistency even for things we know well can sometimes be surprisingly hard!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

The internet is a magical place.

had it been 14 you would have a torrent of ill will where no excuse or response would have been sufficient in the minds of those who fail at life.

We must secure equal forgiveness for the people and the future inadvertent online mistakes.

I got stuck on the word corner of all words. Ugh

Huh? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/color

I'm normally terrible at anagrams.

Enjoying time-based games must be some prey animal adaptation, y'all are probably vegan and have negative canthal tilt.

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"

Oh it was supposed to be Habit…

I anticipate the NY Times will buy you out and I am very jealous

Spoiler alert ahead: unethical way to win that needs to be fixed.

Play in incognito mode and when you lose, you already know the word(s). Restart the browser and you are ready to play again, instantly.

  function getPercentileText(survived) {
      if (survived === 18) return 'Top 1% of players today ';
      if (survived === 17) return 'Top 2% of players today ';
      if (survived === 16) return 'Top 3% of players today ';
      if (survived === 15) return 'Top 5% of players today ';
      if (survived >= 12 && survived <= 14) return 'Top 10% of players today ';
      if (survived >= 10 && survived <= 11) return 'Top 20% of players today ';
      if (survived >= 8 && survived <= 9) return 'Top 50% of players today ';
      return 'No trophy earned today ';
  }

Interestingly, whenever I failed, the correct answer felt totally obvious - and I wonder how this observation relates to frame semantics theory?

And not being native english speaker (as you, reading my comment, may have noticed) makes this harder, but still an exciting game.

Anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

- average time to correct answer - correct percentage

I think you should leave it hard like this. Make people earn that perfect score. Maybe add a dedicated clear button. Others have mentioned shuffle but I think you should leave as is, it's more challenging. Awesome stuff I'm going to send this to my mom she will be addicted.

It's tedious to have to hit DEL 6 or 7 times towards the end of the game. Maybe ESC could clear the whole word?

The game amazingly had 132,411 players yesterday and received tons of player feedback. After a long night talking with players and play testing I’ve shipped the following changes:

.

1. I’ve kept the 30 second timer but you now continue through the whole 18 words to get a final score of x/18.

2. I’ve added a new share feature to better show your result in a similar Wordle style.

.

Thanks again for all the feedback and for checking out the game!

I didn't read the comments after trying it out yesterday so I was surprised by the change, but it definitely feels better to keep going.

This is classic NYT puzzle territory.

I would add a leaderboard, and then from the second word on, as you keep guessing something like "better than 10% of users", to keep me motivated.

I also wonder if you add different languages, for me it wasn't that easy in English.

As implemented: There is a clear "game over". You did as well as you could; try again tomorrow. That's great. The length/difficulty gets harder as you go on, so getting to 18 is a true challenge. Also great. The letters are in the order they are in, no reshuffling. This is also great. You can't just spam reshuffle until you see it; you have to make do with what you got.

It can get bit tedious as one progresses, you need to push yourself to continue. Not sure what can be done to motivate yourself to continue. But I did enjoy since it didn’t make me restart if I lose a round.

A shame, I wouldn't want to play any more in this state. Not as compelling.

Any plan to have multilingual support? Would love a French version.

I scored 15/18 words

Top 5% of players today

https://18words.com

I just wanted to say—you’ve made a seriously addictive game! Congrats!

I was wondering if you’d be interested in bringing it to CrazyGames (www.crazygames.com). We’d love to help you reach a bigger audience and monetize your awesome game.

If that sounds interesting, feel free to send me an email at [email protected]. I’d love to chat!

Looking forward to hearing from you!