Just a vote since I'm seeing a lot of anti-timer sentiment: I like the timer because it creates a conclusive way for the game to end, and causes me to spend a lot less time on the game, I imagine. But I also think it makes sense to have a non-timer mode. It would also be cool to have like 3 shuffles that you are allowed to use. As an exit to the non-timer mode, I think it would be fine to have an "I give up " button.
I also love the countdown. Counterintuitively it makes the game less stressful — the counter goes back to 30 no matter what. If the timer counted up, you'd constantly need to care about getting each one as fast as possible, or fret about one that's taking you minutes, etc.
With the countdown, you more want to care about the high level stuff: Keep your brain agile enough to get the next one, figure out more general patterns, ensure you "cover" the promising patterns, notice tough spots (with tons of patterns) where you you'll need to lock in. That stuff is more fun to focus on than speed.
Everyone wants to fail less, sure. It's not surprising people's feedback focuses on the mechanic that made you fail! That doesn't mean changing that bit will make the game more fun.
> If the timer counted up, you'd constantly need to care about getting each one as fast as possible, or fret about one that's taking you minutes, etc.
The timer doesn’t have to be visible at all until the end.
> Everyone wants to fail less, sure.
It has nothing to do with not wanting to fail. Sometimes people just want to chill a bit or kill a few minutes with a simple word puzzle that engages your game without being stressful. This game doesn’t even let you repeat the challenges you took, so to play it you always have to be highly engaged. That’s fine for some games, but not every game needs to be like that, and this one doesn’t.
No one’s asking timer mode to go away, or even become the default, just to have the alternative option.
This is not a game for me - I don’t enjoy scrambled letter games in the first place, and I don’t really respond to time pressure in games. That said, I don’t think you should change it. It’s conceptually clear as it is, and adding a forgiving mode would just make it wishy washy. The simplicity is appealing and it doesn’t have to be for everyone!
If you're not set on a "survival mode" design, could you design it as counting up instead of counting down? And maybe showing a "par" time, that way players can opt into the challenge vs. just a morning brainteaser.
I'm totally fine with the way it works, because, well, it's a game, losing should be losing. I mean, I kinda want to continue, but I'm glad I'm not allowed to. I didn't make it. There will be another chance tomorrow.
But I'd like to propose allowing keyboard input. Losing because of your mouse skills in a pattern recognition game is annoying.
I wondered about this because I used a keyboard to do it. But then I thought maybe krick used mobile and there's no onscreen keyboard. But then I realized that krick said mouse skills and so is probably on a desktop. I think maybe just some graphical indicator that you can type would be helpful for first time users.
No, I did try to type, but nothing happened. I seem to remember I did check that I had English layout turned on, but maybe I actually didn't. Really cannot guess any better than that what might have been the problem.
Anyway, doesn't matter, it was totally my mistake, everything works for me as well as for everyone else.
Complete gut reaction to your first question, my preference would be two fold:
1. An option to start the game in timeless mode
2. When I fail a word, prior to showing me the word, give me the option to enter timeless mode for the rest of the run, such that it doesn't ruin the current round, and that run is now excluded
As for the second, that's more suggestive and I don't care as much either way. Personally me for me I've just been going down the archive trying each day. I enjoy competitive games, so once I miss a word I don't have much interest in continuing on.
a) the timer would be cumulative, so that solving the early words faster gives more time for the harder words,
b) going negative wouldn't end the game, it would just turn the time red or something, with the goal being to finish all of the words with the highest time-remaining possible, rather than just to win/lose.
I'd prefer a mode where you fail the word, but can continue to the next word.
Perhaps it is intentionally part of the design, but being a bit of a perfectionist, I failed a couple of times, and found that actually the longer words were (often) easier than the shorter ones...
1. Yes, hints, like maybe the position of a random letter, then another, etc. The game could allow you to "buy" more letters with your existing score (and maybe an initial amount: everyone starts at, say, 36?)
2. Yes being able to continue would be great, it's frustrating that the game just stops.
As someone who definitely gets worked up when there’s a timer (still got all 18; top 1% really? Might be good to show a rough number of total players), I don’t really get it without a timer.
I am with the people asking for a scramble/ shuffle button. I have to do anagrams all the time in cryptic crosswords and sometimes it requires seeing things in a totally different order to unlock the answer.
Oftentimes feedback is useful to address a complaint. “Lots of people are frustrated with X” is great signal. The solution might not be (but certainly sometimes is) the fixes they recommend; but the pain they’re expressing is real.
The timer is OK, IMHO, but longer words should give you more time to guess. Makes little sense to give people 30 seconds to guess both a four-letter and a seven-letter word.
That would also let you scale to any arbitrary word length.
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.
I think Zach Gage (developer of excellent games including Really Bad Chess, Spelltower, etc) says on Adam Conover's podcast that for many people they have difficulty improving at a skill when they have time (or other) pressure
Thus, he always includes a relaxed mode to let someone practice without any stress. Incidentally, he realized that some people only ever play in the relaxed mode!
Maybe if it counted up I would be less annoyed by it. I like how the NYT does it with their crossword app. If you complete it under some threshold you get a gold star but there's no upper limit on the time.
The Zanagrams game, which AFACK is from the same developer (?), actually does this - it counts up like a stopwatch, then compares your time to the global average at the end.
Having a timer is maybe not so much the problem, but there's no reward here for doing early words quickly and no appreciation for the fact that difficulty is not linear. Would be nice if you could bank up some time for when harder ones come.
I'd probably say there instead of a Challenge Mode and a Relax Mode like you said, it could just be a combined mode where there is a timer but after it goes out it simply continues the game on Relax Mode.
Or alternatively every word still has the timer and then at the end if you finish, it tells you how many words you completed under the timer and gives you a score based on that.
And then maybe an option for those who don't want the timer to show at all, since maybe it adds a bit of pressure. You can have just a simple option that removes the timer entirely from view
Another idea: maybe time how long you take for each word, and for the competitive among us, show stats on how long you took compared to everyone else, and a leaderboard for who took the least total time.
In one sense I really enjoy the timer up to the point that I lose, but it feels very unsatisfactory, especially if I lose early, & I'm acutely aware the difficulty level it's set at will be experienced radically differently by different players (to the exclusion of most I would imagine).
Having a timerless mode is very much needed as an option - there's no real risk of "cheating" with these cookie-based browser games anyway since I could just have infinite retries in a private tab if I felt like doing that.
Yea, the timer is a little stressful though I understand the purpose/design behind it. I do like the suggestion of the no timer or a relaxed mode with.
PS anyone have any other fun, simple games like this and Zanagrams? I found https://maptap.gg/ recently and that also gives me the same Classic Web feeling that OP mentioned.
Not everyone plays games for purposeless dumb challenges and difficulty. Games are supposed to be fun. Sometimes you just want to chill and engage the brain at a leisurely pace.
While I agree that for some people games with a time limit are not fun, I don't think the challenges and difficulty should be classified as "purposeless" and "dumb". For many the challenge/difficulty IS the fun part, and they serve a genuine purpose. If you don't like that, then play a different game, but that doesn't mean the game you don't like is useless.
Right. I don’t mean every challenge and difficulty is purposeless and dumb, just that those don’t have to be the goal, and that sometimes an easy game is what you want.
Tangentially, I have noticed some of the most well-balanced difficult games I have ever played were the ones with very granular difficulty settings. Examples include CrossCode and Celeste. Crypt of the Necrodancer too, though the customisation there feels like it crosses into too granular. In each I changed the difficulty settings exactly once, for optional challenges, and it made the games way more enjoyable.
All games should have the option to have the timer turned off.
I regularly do cryptic crosswords (so this sort of game is in my wheelhouse). My goal is to complete the puzzle, not do so in a particular time. Completing it is often hard (depending on which paper I've picked up). There is no timer when I'm say with paper and pen, so it baffles me that every online newspaper cryptic has a timer on by default, and in some cases it can't be disabled.
It's also the thing that "ruined" the LinkedIn puzzles for me. They're generally fun puzzles, but timing it against my PB or - worse - people I'm connected to on LinkedIn just wrecks the experience. I opted out of leaderboards, because I don't really want to know a guy I worked with years ago trashes me at Queens every morning.
Strong agreement that a "relax" mode is needed here - at longer word lengths its becoming a test of recall and anagram ability, and that's fun in its own right. The timer just makes it a bit "meh", and I won't be returning as a result. Shame.
This reminds me of how my wife absolutely thrives on gamification and the social competition of things like Peloton, while they destroy 100% of my interest in the thing. We’re both intensely competitive people but in completely different ways.
Yeah I think this will be a bit too easy without a timer. But that ui does make it kind of intense, i forgot how to spell a basic word because i was thinking i only have 10 red seconds left
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:
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 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.
If you do that you could not even show the timer. Or make it more discrete or toggle its presence. For the person who wants to optimize (although tbh its not really even actionable), but otherwise remove it since its stressing people out
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.
Shuffle would certainly help with that. I felt like I was expending a ton of energy and time shuffling mentally (but I'll concede that if I did it enough I'd get faster at it).
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 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.
On some levels I tried guessing, starting with different letters, and still got into some local minima in my brain where I couldn't guess the word, only for it to be something obvious like 'pound'.
i've literally never heard of this, but great to pollute my brain with more of this bs.
serious question: if the majority aren't "in the know" and some minority is, and the game has literally nothing to do with sending any sekrut messages, who cares? like, is a white nationalist sitting here on HN, playing this game over a coffee and thinks, "heh, sick this is 4 numbers away from the callsign"
If an uneducated acquaintance of yours was about to name their newborn child "Adolf", would you interject that this name might not be such a great idea?
Not sure where you’re from but it’s not esoteric at all. Here in the US our current administration is constantly vice-signaling to white supremacists to maintain them as a political base, and uses myriad similar winks to do it. One example: in 2020 the Trump campaign ran Facebook ads featuring an inverted red triangle. The opening sentence was 14 words long. They ran the ad 88 times. It’s ok to choose to be ignorant of the implications, but it’s better to maintain situational awareness.
(I’m not saying the game needs to change its name.)
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.
Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?
I do have another version where it accepts ANY word but I found it quite unsatisfying when I survived by randomly spamming combinations and finding a really obscure word.
So am currently running it against a 20,000 word wordlist instead of my larger 300,000 wordlist
I've built a some word games over the years (e.g., wordwhile.com, omiword.com), and one thing I've discovered is that players find it very unsatisfying when they enter a real, valid word and the game rejects it. I imagine that the timer would amplify that sense of unfairness.
Granted, there are also people who get annoyed when the game seems too accepting of unusual words, but if you can point them to a valid dictionary definition for that oddball word, they usually accept it without argument.
I'm one of those people who get annoyed if it's too loose. But I can just impose that restriction on myself and look down on people who rely on obscure words.
Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?
EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.
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 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.
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
Clear your cookies for the site or open incognito mode. But I agree there's no reason not to let people continue and just mark where they ended "legitimately".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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).
One thing you can do is store a word profile in your database, which is a string of all of the letters in the word in alphabetical order. So the word profile for 'apple' is 'aelpp'. Then you can just include all of the words that match the profiles of the real words. For example, 'quiet' and 'quite' both have the profile 'eiqtu'.
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.)
Please enlighten me on how they work. My understanding is that captchas usually either involve challenges for humans or require proof of work (some computation). I found the idea of this game along the lines of a human challenge.
Captchas are usually used to separate humans and bots, typically with something a human can solve but a bot cannot. A bot would have no trouble at all with this game.
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.
I'm equally laughing because I remember a coding snafu I ran into once, where we were aggressively filtering out "1488" turns out someone finally joined and "1488" was part of their user ID (auto-increment field!), and we realized maybe we shouldn't be checking the auto-increment field, not sure if it was me being too aggressive and not thinking about it, or another developer, but I did laugh once I figured out why that one user was unable to use half of the web app. This was for a gaming community based project, we had a lot of trolls come and go, and they would definitely shove these sorts of references in their usernames, and anywhere else you had custom user input.
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.