Re:Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the lon...
by ethannam9022 on Monday August 10, 2026 @01:12AM
(#49239439)
This seems like a fun way to practice English vocabulary. One thing confused me, though — I thought the goal was to make the longest word using all of the given letters, but it looks like you can also compete with words that don’t use every letter. Is that intentional?
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Re:Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the lon...
by johnchinjew on Monday August 10, 2026 @01:46AM
(#49239654)
Yes, it's intentional to allow words that don't use all the letters. It can be very tricky to think of a panagram every time (word that has all 7 letters used at least once). Hence, we don't require every submission to be a panagram. I'll work on making the instructions clearer!
There is a bit of an interesting related sharp edge here. Sometimes the longest word for a given set of letters actually does NOT use all the letters! I've thought of a number of approaches to address this tension, but, opted to keep scoring dead simple in the end. I may experiment in the future on this topic though.
Re:Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the lon...
by johnchinjew on Monday August 10, 2026 @01:53AM
(#49239698)
I'd also like to expand it to work with other alphabetic languages too.