I actually initially envisioned this the way you described with monospaced font and one-letter-per-square, but I found that it wasn't possible because the puzzle became prohibitively wide to such a disproportionate extent that it A. couldn't fit on a mobile screen, B. looked very odd, C. involved so many pieces that the challenge was elevated to a tedious level.

I'll take a look at free positioning pieces outside the board too, but I just want to give that a little more thought.

While most of the puzzles on the Daily Baffle were intended to be rather challenging, for this one I really just wanted to make something somewhat beautiful and relaxing. It wasn't so much about coming up with a highly original idea or a difficult challenge as much as just combining a few familiar ideas in a pleasant way.

It was coded entirely by Claude, with me carefully prodding it on to achieve the look I wanted. I had hand-coded everything on the Daily Baffle, but those days are past now. I was pretty thrilled with the "window through the fog" effect that CC was able to achieve from my written design spec. I wasn't sure if that would come out right, but it did. It's just a static react app hosted on Render, no backend. The haikus are handwritten with the help of a massive list of generated nature concepts alongside possible metaphor angles. The art is generated by Gemini and ChatGPT. I wish it was hand-painted, but that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming and then this puzzle would likely not exist.

Happy to answer any questions, and encourage anyone to check out the Baffle if they like harder puzzles!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568162

Points: 116

# Comments: 33

It does include some brutal sadomasochism with graphic torture, that's true, and that's why it isn't better known. If that part bothers you, which is fair, I would skim past it. The story overall is quite worth it

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994899

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

That is such a crazy way to start a response to someone trying to argue with you. I should try this. That's amazing. I know you didn't mean it as a trick, at least I'm pretty sure you meant it sincerely, but I'm just struck by the power of it to defuse and redirect the conversation. And this was a very low-grade example, but I could imagine this being useful in much more heated contexts.

There's Truthsorting, a logic puzzle where you have to order logical statements to make them true or false.

Pathword, a puzzle where you lay out letters along a path to spell out 4 words.

Morphology, a clued word ladder written by a different contribution daily.

And a few others!

I've been trying to promote it for a few months but I haven't had a ton of luck, to be honest. The audience hovers around 500 people and growing it beyond that has been pretty challenging.