Show HN: 18 Words

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?

I'd appreciate a 'shuffle' button that just re-mixed-up the letters into a different order. I find this keeps me from obsessing on adjacent letter pairs that my eyes/brain lock onto.

The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and I’m not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. I’ve 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.

Would be nice to have a ‘scramble!’ button so it makes it slightly easier when we get stuck

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"

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

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 it’s 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.

Don’t 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.

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 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/+ /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.

Great game.

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.

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

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

Pretty frustrating when you find a word, but it's not THE word. Pretty fun otherwise.

Interesting to see how much more popular creating games has become as AI has become more powerful. Right now I am working on a house price guessing game and I know I would not have be able to get anywhere with it a couple of years ago. It has still taken me a few weeks to get it where I wanted but I have had to intervene a lot with things the AI just wasn't good at.

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).

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

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).

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.

Non-native speaker here: really really hard, never make it past 13/18

Cool. I wish I could choose British English as an option though, I failed to get words like Humor or Color because they’re just not in my lexiy.

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.

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

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?

Man, got something interesting and FUN on HN after a long time, LOVED IT

UI does not register quick taps on iphone 15p duckduckgo browser

This is like the on-line game Text Twist.

This game helped me realise I'm a doofus 10/10

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 I’ve actually completed.

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.

Whats a good strategy for when you just don’t see it? Trying to think of a way to make incremental progress.

3rd word it asked of me was 'BAITH' which is crazy business.

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

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.

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.

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?

Something about not being able to shuffle the tiles makes this hard for me.

I didn’t realize the word “crowd“ only had one vowel until I saw it scrambled!

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'

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/

Shuffle button needed.

This a good game. It’s fun, simple and quick. It’s self explanatory and clear what you need to do.

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.

This is so much more fun than those dumb word games on linkedin

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).

It’d 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?

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.

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 haven’t been able to post anything at all, so I don’t even know what it’s like to make a post.

Damn fun and challenging

Congrats! This looks like a daily one for me

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

When I didn't know the word I just mashed the given letters on the keyboard randomly, sometimes I got lucky with it

nice game to start my day. a refresh button to reorder the letter would be great.

Could I have the source code so I can plug in the Polish word list? It would make a great training app for Scrabble.

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.

iPhone bug: double tapping on a letter zooms in the viewport with no way to zoom back out, permanently breaking the page.

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

That was really fun. Made it to 16/18. Thank you popmpomsheep.

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!!!

Nicely done. A shuffle letters button would be nice.

This is fun! Could use a short "how it works" blurb on the landing page though :)

This could be a cool captcha challenge (without the timer).

Fun, that's it. New addiction after daily wordle unlocked

Embarrassed of where I failed (#8). Very cool game though!

great game, what do you think of adding shuffle?

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.

Nice, this is pretty fun!

what made you go with 18?

Great game, well done

wow, addictive

Ha fun little game :)

This is a lot of fun lol. Well done!

Damn got to 13.

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.

Fun game!

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

LAMER is a real word and COLOR is not.

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

[dead]

4/18

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