Wow, this post blew up! Thank you everyone for all the helpful feedback. I’ve just deployed a few updates:
- Added a short playable tutorial for new players to learn how the game works.
- Added a timer below the grid. You can hide this in the settings if you don’t want the extra pressure!
- Fixed some bonus words based on your recommendations.
A hint would maybe be good. You could highlight the first letter and a direction, for example.
The share functionality could be improved. Sharing the score and time to the specific puzzle would be nice.
Also I came back to this thread to comment that this is the most engaging, fun, and satisfying word puzzle game I've maybe ever played. My only complaint is that there aren't more puzzles!
I was a bit stunned by the concept of "bonus words". I found that every word should count. Also because some words are just plural forms (e.g. stroke+s), so kinda cheep?!
I think the board (and disappearing letters) are made with a list of words in mind. Thus, to complete the puzzle (dissolve all letters) you cannot count the bonus words as they were not accounted when creating the letter graph.
This was definitely a challenge until I figured out how it works. I originally was confused by the connections and started off embarrassingly slow, but once I got a few words and letters started to disappear, I was able to power through it pretty quickly. A solid game. Suggest adding a timed option so users can brag/compare/share their time.
I enjoyed this and loved the minimal UI, good copywriting, and tasteful animations. My brain gets a little bit stuck on words that I can see but aren’t valid because of a missing connection, but I get that this is one of the main points of the puzzle. Anyway, great job!
I would try to generate puzzles that don't involve plurals at all.
It happened twice that the word I missed was the plural of a word I already found. After finding a word I don't follow it again so finding the plural happened by accident twice, and it felt cheap.
1:40 with (I think) two bonus words. It would be nice to have bonus words counted at the end. Maybe some way of setting a score based on time plus bonus words.
1:25 with one bonus word on the HN special. I saw that the bonus words are highlighted in orange in the final word list so yes, it was two on the first puzzle.
I'm stuck. Does that mean I chose the wrong word earlier and used up an essential letter? Does the sequence of word guesses matter? Is there an Undo feature so I can back up and try a different order of guesses? Can I get a hint? Is there a way to give up and see the solution (order of word guesses)?
You're not stuck, the board only removes letters and connections that are not used by any other word (probably excluding "bonus words"). So the word(s) you're missing are still on the board.
No hint feathre though, the hints are the letters going away. You'll probably have to use a scrabble search or something.
the score should include how many bonus words you found (out of how many there were in total) and instead of time it should count how many tries you made because technically you could brute force this and try all combinations. counting each try would eliminate that (for anyone trying to get a high score)
Pretty fun, took me about 10 minutes but found 24 words 10 of them bonus. This was #5 for future viewers.
Edit: welp, spent another 15 mins and managed to solve the previous 4. Currently whipping up a custom version for myself that gives a new set of words related to a theme on each solve, love it.
Thanks. I use a combination of AI to first score the words by obscurity and then manually decide which ones to include based on this score and my own judgement.
I then manually test each of the puzzles and throw out any that I feel weren't "fun" to solve for whatever reason
I have it semi automated but I've found they need to be manually reviewed to make fun puzzles.
Basically I start with an 8, 9 or 10 letter word as the core of the puzzle. I then have a generator add random letters and paths around this until it makes a grid with a good number of valid words.
I then run the words though GPT 5.5 which scores them on how "common" the word is to the average person. This is very subjective as everyone has very different vocabularies.
I then manually decide which words to include as core required words or bonus words.
Finally the puzzle is tested by my wife and mum to see if it is "fun" or it goes in the bin haha.
That is how I imagined it. It felt there must have been some human element. I appreciate your effort.
Initially I thought I would feel cheated and the solution must require knowledge of some obscure scrabble player only words. I was pleased the solutions felt honest. For that reason I don't think you should offer an option to give up and reveal the answers.
This is so much fun. And something while playing reminded me of a this video I saw where someone asks her boyfriend "what does Y-E-S spell", and he said "yes". Then she asked him what "E-Y-E-S" spelled, and he couldn't figure it out (he kept saying "eee... yes?"). Anyway, I was looking at the remaining letters with just one word left to go. Four of them formed a word I had already guessed, plus one letter, but didn't make any sense with that additional letter. Until it did. I won't spoil which was it was, but it was in puzzle #1.
I found #6 unnecessarily difficult. While I personally really enjoy puzzles, primarily logic ones and spelling ones, this melted my brain. Maybe you could add a "hint" button that shows you which letter is the starting letter for a word in the remaining to-be-found list.
The instructions are unclear for my input device. I'm on a macOS webkit browser, and I have to click each individual letter, _then click one last time after all letters are highlighted_ to mark the work as found. This falls way outside of the directions "Drag Play to start."
You can just click the first letter, then drag through the rest. When I moved from mobile to desktop, I also thought it was click-only, but dragging works in Chrome and Safari.
Hmm I'm also macOS webkit and can drag no problem. Are you using Safari?
It is also possible to tap each individual letter like you described as an alternative control method but I've found dragging to be more intuitive so is the standard control.
On desktop you can also type the letters with your keyboard ;)
The rules should probably explicitly mention the minimum length of four letters. (It's a reasonable rule; it just wasn't obvious from reading the info in "how to play")
I also must have a weird vocabulary. "Fete" was treated as an uncommon bonus word, which doesn't seem particularly esoteric to me, but "tarragon" was one of the ones I needed to finish a certain puzzle, and I had never heard of that before.
Bonus words for me just now included NITS and TITS! I think the explanation about them being lesser known just confuses; it's more that they're not essential to completing the puzzle.
Cool that they list the definitions of the words afterwards. This makes it even more fun for non-native speakers, as it adds a free learning aspect to it.
I think it would be even better if each word had an edge only used by the word, such that each successful guess removes an edge and you couldn't guess words twice (assuming each word only has one path).
Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to give up, because I can't find any more words. I found 8 (2 bonus ones), and am stuck finding any more. There should be a "reveal" button, so you can see what else you were supposed to find.
Simple and fun, appreciate the definitions! Was wondering about ideas for creating a simple game using the vocab list from my koreader app, but will probably need to be a crossword type game where I need to match definitions with words. This just reminded me of that :)
Fun game! On iOS I frequently triggered a double-tap zoom accidentally, and it’s weirdly difficult to zoom back out once that happens (a second double-tap doesn’t work, and pinch to zoom out only works in some areas of the page).
It was fun! I like how unlike the nyt games one, you can get additional information from the edges' existence. Would advise removing having both plural/singular forms of a word. Great work!
Great game! I really like how it removes any possible letters or connections. I managed to finish two zanagrams without any wrong answers. It’d be great if there was a way to gain a “perfect” score.
The share functionality could be improved. Sharing the score and time to the specific puzzle would be nice.
Also I came back to this thread to comment that this is the most engaging, fun, and satisfying word puzzle game I've maybe ever played. My only complaint is that there aren't more puzzles!
Thanks for the fun :)
I’m kidding of course - great game!
(edit: ah, I see they are shown later)
https://www.puzzmo.com
I was a bit stunned by the concept of "bonus words". I found that every word should count. Also because some words are just plural forms (e.g. stroke+s), so kinda cheep?!
Keep ups the good work!
Found six bonus words.
It happened twice that the word I missed was the plural of a word I already found. After finding a word I don't follow it again so finding the plural happened by accident twice, and it felt cheap.
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.vayunmathur.gam...
https://github.com/plhosk/wordtracer
They're both on FDroid
No hint feathre though, the hints are the letters going away. You'll probably have to use a scrabble search or something.
I agree that the "share" representation should include the number of bonus words found. Or just the triple of "total words / tries / wall-clock time."
It would also make sense to share some kind of metric for "how early did you find the longest word."
What dictionary are you using?
[0] https://jcuenod.github.io/phrase-maze-poc/
Edit: welp, spent another 15 mins and managed to solve the previous 4. Currently whipping up a custom version for myself that gives a new set of words related to a theme on each solve, love it.
I then manually test each of the puzzles and throw out any that I feel weren't "fun" to solve for whatever reason
I really enjoyed this, and hope to continue doing so.
Basically I start with an 8, 9 or 10 letter word as the core of the puzzle. I then have a generator add random letters and paths around this until it makes a grid with a good number of valid words.
I then run the words though GPT 5.5 which scores them on how "common" the word is to the average person. This is very subjective as everyone has very different vocabularies.
I then manually decide which words to include as core required words or bonus words.
Finally the puzzle is tested by my wife and mum to see if it is "fun" or it goes in the bin haha.
Initially I thought I would feel cheated and the solution must require knowledge of some obscure scrabble player only words. I was pleased the solutions felt honest. For that reason I don't think you should offer an option to give up and reveal the answers.
It is also possible to tap each individual letter like you described as an alternative control method but I've found dragging to be more intuitive so is the standard control.
On desktop you can also type the letters with your keyboard ;)
I think it would be even better if each word had an edge only used by the word, such that each successful guess removes an edge and you couldn't guess words twice (assuming each word only has one path).
I thought I was slow but now I see others took 10 minutes and 20 minutes! Maybe I'm not so slow!
Zanagrams #5 Complete in 03:53 https://zanagrams.com/
Edit: solved it! Being stuck is annoying, though.
I will look into potentially adding percentiles in the next few days once I see how big the ranges are!
https://files.catbox.moe/fgmb4b.jpeg
Super fun, i found a tons of words and the last 3 ones were really hard to find
But the bonus word (a word most player would miss) on 29/7 was not very subtle. No spoilers, but you won't miss it >.<
Zanagrams #5 Complete in 11:23 https://zanagrams.com/