Yeah it's unfortunate because I'm British, "one" and "won" are said the same for us but I didn't notice that they would be different for Americans. I should exclude puzzles where these differences happen, I just didn't spot this one. I'll have to test each puzzle with my best american accent on going forward.

>In the examples we have "thyme → time", but doesn't "thyme" have the "th" sound while "time" has the "t" sound?

In the UK we pronounce this like "time". Is that not the case in the US?

>Finally, "One new puzzle each day" - why do people do this? There's no way to play more than 1 puzzle, but by tomorrow I will have probably lost interest.

I need time to find the right puzzles and as you can see it can be pretty tricky to find ones that don't have regional pronunciation deviations, are fun to solve and are easy enough for a broad majority. I could add archive playing but frankly I do like the idea of a daily puzzle, even if some others don't like that. I think for as many people who don't like it there are people who do.

>Will you / could you add access to past puzzles? That's the first thing I looked for but couldn't find.

Yeah I'm still torn about this. On the one hand, it's obviously a really easy feature to add and allows users who want to play more to do so. And I'm aware that a lot of people really don't like it when daily puzzle games don't let you play through the archive. On the other hand, I am quite romantic about the daily thing. I really loved the fact you could only play Wordle once a day, there was something special about it in an era of unlimited, endless content. I know it's no longer novel to limit players to just one puzzle a day, but something is compelling me to keep it that way.

Regarding the steakhouse/stakeholder issue, I think that because these words lean American they got missed in the compound word generation stage. Will add them now. Can totally see how that created a lot of confusion for you when trying to solve yesterday’s puzzle.

And yeah I've been finding differentiating between correctness and validity a really hard design challenge because I don’t want to reveal to the player that they are on the solution path since the ambiguity/branching is often what makes it challenging. I think there needs to be a clearer signal that whilst your answer might be accepted, it's not necessarily the correct solution.

Steak/stake is both an anagram and a compound and I still haven’t solved how we handle these edge cases. I shouldn’t really have released this particular puzzle given it starts with this issue. I just didn’t even notice till it was too late!

Thanks for playing and for the super valuable feedback!

And yes, TwixT does look like a really novel game! I've never really seen a peg board style board game before. I'll try find an old copy on eBay and give it a go.

I added a few more transforms, anagrams, verb/tense changes, but the answers kept coming out too obvious. I couldn't distort the word enough to make it interesting. The breakthrough was compound pairs. Jumping from one word to another through their compound (sea → horse, via seahorse) really obscures the path and that's when it suddenly got fun and unpredictable.

I've been sharing it with friends. I'm in the UK so mostly UK testers, fair warning that a couple of the homophones may lean British.

They've been playing daily and seem hooked, so it felt worth posting here. It's one puzzle a day mainly so I actually have time to hand pick puzzles that have a satisfying path. Today's puzzle is on the easy side but they can get really tricky. The name is from 'betwixt', the whole game is about moving between two words. I did clock afterwards that there's a 60s board game with the same name, but they're pretty different things.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221568

Points: 18

# Comments: 20