A question I asked myself when I first created it. Some people will be annoyed by that, some won't. It's fine if you're the former! but the fact is, without an input field, there's no way to verify that your solution is accepted and mark the puzzle as completed.
I was really confused about that, I would suggest showing the 'yay you got it' screen as soon as the correct letters are entered. as it is, I didn't even see that the 'enter' key was there on the left side of the kb
Very observant! I know that that is possible and left it in, at least for now.
Sorry about that though. For now, if you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.
Sorry about that. If you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.
Maybe I should add a reveal option for when someone feels done with it.
There isn't, but maybe there should be. Sorry about that. For now, if you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.
In this case "prill" is the obscure word, sorry. I understand some people will be annoyed that the obscure words they happen to know don't work, but I think it's better for the 95% of players who would be disappointed to find that "prill" or "brall" was part of the solution, effectively giving them no chance.
Each puzzle has only one solution, so if you find one that doesn't work with 1 or more extremely uncommon words, it's safe to assume that's not the solution.
I agree that puzzles with progression are the best kind. This puzzle just isn't that kind of puzzle. I didn't want to make another wordle clone, there's a thousand of those and everyone's tired of that style being copied over and over. It isn't for everyone, and that's okay! A lot of people like NYT Connections a lot hate it. Same with Spelling Bee and same with crosswords.
As for the letter lifeline, I am curious how you decided that the third letter's identity is obvious. There are plenty of words that end in ISS, IZE, and ILL, not to mention OSS, OZE, and OLL (e.g. SCROLL, EXTOLL). There is also USS, UZE, and ULL, (e.g. GAUZE, TRUSS, BULL, although they don't fit.)
The problem is that without the progression, it leads very quickly to either brute force or giving up. The lifelines don't feel like earned progression (even if they function that way in terms of solving), they feel like a minor defeat.
I agree with the grandparent comment: Puzzles with progression are the best kind, and this is exactly that kind of puzzle. The only problem is that you didn't implement the progression parts yet. But you still can!
When the player guesses three letters, e.g. if they guess BRA, they're implicitly asking whether the answer is BRASS/ZEBRA/?????. For each of those words, there are several ways their guess can be "wrong": (1) The guess doesn't fit this clue at all: none of BRALL, LBRAL, LLBRA is a word. (2) The guess fits this clue, but its placement is wrong: ZEBRA is a word, but we're actually expecting ___ZE, not ZE___. (3) The guess fits this clue, but it's not the expected word: BRASS is a word, but only the A is in the right place to match the underlying expected word. ZEBRA is a word, but none of the letters are a match.
You should surface some of that new information to the player. You could do that Wordle-style by just surfacing it automatically with no further interaction; or, since there are sometimes different kinds of new information, you could let the player interactively choose what kind of new information they'd like to see as a reward for their guess: See which letters are right? See which placements are right? And so on. And, since there are three clues in play at once, maybe you allow the player to get new information from only one clue per guess.
Concretely: The clues are SS/ZE/LL. The player guesses BRA. You fill in "BRASS" and "ZEBRA" in yellow and "BRALL" in red. Tools appear to the right of BRASS — "Check placement" and "Check letters" — and also to the right of ZEBRA. The player clicks "Check placement" on ZEBRA and gets a negative response (which is recorded visibly somehow). A new prompt appears. The player guesses PAR. You fill in "SPARS" in yellow, PARZE and PARLL in red. Tools appear to the right of SPARS. The player clicks "Check letters" and the A turns green, indicating that the first word has an A in the third position. (Maybe the second S also turns green, and the first S turns yellow — Wordle rules. But that feels redundant with "Check placement.") Alternatively, the A turns yellow, indicating that there's an A somewhere in the correct three-letter answer; and the P and R are grayed out on the keyboard. A new prompt appears... And so on.
This kind of progression would make the game much more engaging!
I appreciate the well-thought-out comment. I'm reluctant to imitate Wordle's style of successive partial confirmation, which I feel is a tired pattern now. It feels like there's a trillion [*]dles, all of whom operate on that principle. It might have made a better game in a vacuum, but in the context of that deluge is it still better? I'm not so sure.
> A lot of people like NYT Connections a lot hate it
I was almost turned off of Connections by the poor instructions.
The instructions say that categories 'will always be more specific than "5-LETTER WORDS," "NAMES" or "VERBS"'.
Then one of the first puzzles I did had "PRONOUNS" as a category! That did not make a good first impression.
The interface also probably turns off some people who would otherwise enjoy it. It would be greatly improved if they replaced the "Shuffle" with letting you re-arrange the words by dragging them.
Their conception of 'category' is ever-evolving. Recently it was "ingredients in minestrone", but of course that's just a random subset of "food". They also do things like "numbers minus a letter".
I still play Connections, and I do what was written up as "hard mode" in the NYT today: try to enter the matching quadruplets in reverser order, starting with purple.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Today's is a quirky one that some people will solve at a glance and others will have to stare at for awhile. Personally I'm terrible at my own puzzle and would also have needed the lifelines.
It doesn't use obscure words. As far as I can see BRALL is an archaic alternative spelling of BRAWL that's only listed on a site for obscure words. Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster both have no result for that, so...that wouldn't really be very fun if that was the solution, would it?
Your site only says "words" or "complete words", it doesn't reference any dictionary. BRALL is a word, albeit an obscure one [0] that is not found in most dictionaries.
It's found in one dictionary. Last published in 1911.
Brall isn't an obscure word, it's an obsolete one. I think it's fair to say that if your word isn't in Oxford or American Heritage, you shouldn't expect it to be in the result set.
It feels as if you hit "BRASS" and "ZEBRA" then couldn't make it fit with "LL", then searched for "brall" hoping to have a hit.
But if you used WinAMP back in the day, you'd have whipped this one in the ass.
One solution to this problem is to have two dictionaries. One complete dictionary and one common dictionary. You pick puzzles using the common dictionary and then check the obscure/complete dictionary to make sure there are no alternate solutions.
If I omitted any puzzle with alternate obscure solutions, the vast majority of puzzles would be invalid. There are a lot of obscure words.
If on the other hand I set it to accept the alternate obscure solutions, that actually could ruin the puzzle in my opinion.
Take today's with BRA for example - it's a nigh-certainty that the commenter suggesting BRA did not know the archaic alternate spelling of BRAWL. What's much more likely is that they saw "BRASS", then checked ZE and saw "ZEBRA", and then thought "I wonder if BRALL is a word?" and googled it to find that it was indeed a word in a very obscure sense.
Check this google n-gram for a reference of just how obscure that word is - it hasn't registered meaningfully anytime in several centuries. I added in the word "quine," another obscure word, just for comparison, and you can see it's orders of magnitude less common even than that. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brall%2Cbrawl%...
So what would start happening is people would find something that worked for 2 of 3 (which is easy), type it in cuz why not it might work, have it succeed because the 3rd option was written once by a Gregorian monk in a remote monastery in the Balkan Mountains, and be like "huh, well that's dumb." It's actually a lose-lose that would let people off easier because they'd feel like it was done just because they found something that matched 2 of 3 and happened to match the 3rd in a fairly ridiculous way.
Edit: I came up with a solution to this. I'll verify each puzzle against a full dictionary with obscure words included, and if a user puts in a valid obscure solution I'll display a message saying "Valid, but at least one of these words is too obscure. A better solution exists." It'll take a little time to add that functionality though.
Programmatically, no, but I've made about 1500 puzzles and been sharing them with friends for months and neither I nor anyone else have found a double solution yet.
It would happen if I picked generic clues like BR/SL/ER (not a real puzzle, don't try to solve it), but I make a point not to. As long as you pick clues that are a little more specific than that, it's actually extremely improbable, despite what you would intuitively think (I had the same thought in the beginning!). Remember that there are 4 restraints, not 3 - it has to match 3 different prefixes or suffixes, but it also has to only be 3 letters (4 letters on weekends).
Sometimes I'm suspicious and I do verify them, but it's really only a risk with the compound word versions like SELL/LAW/FOX. Those I have to be more careful with.
I'll point out that 26³ is only 17,576, so brute-force checking that there is only one solution for a given problem shouldn't be computationally difficult.
