[jamwise]

My family plays a lot of word games, some are board-game style and of course we all love the NY-Times catalog of puzzles. The idea for this game came to me when I played bananagrams, and lost, after having binged way too much sudoku earlier in the day.

I became obsessed with the idea of making this work, and it was way harder than I expected. The journey took me into the depths of confusability graphs and zero error capacity in information theory. I might write a post about it some day.

[csw-001]

The result is really fun! Well done.

[jamwise]

Thank you! Glad you liked it.

[csw-001]

I’ve spent a bit more time playing here. Still fun!

Some thoughts - switching letters could be fun, some are way more obvious than others, being able to get a hint in the form of a letter swap could be fun?

I know part of the point is to build vocab - but some of these words are tough. Mucic? My concern would be if that’s one’s first impression one might move on thinking it’s just too hard. Makes me wonder if the right approach could be something like wordle - where you look at some candidate puzzles and pick the one for each day that feels the most fun to humans.

[jamwise]

FWIW I was aiming for this to be a "connections" level of difficulty. My sample size is small but the past week win rate is about 65%, which is actually very close to connections. But I also don't want to cause frustration, since a game is supposed to be fun. So I want to think through this hint idea, maybe it can help lessen the load and also give a fun dynamic of deciding when to use your hint, so I'm thinking you just get one and have to decide when to use it?

[csw-001]

Yeah, that could work! It might also be unneeded, it was just a thought…can’t let these things become design by committee. :-)

[jamwise]

Fair enough. I appreciate the feedback regardless. Thanks for sharing.