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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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:
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.
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".
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.
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 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).
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'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.
Thanks everyone for the feedback! Two questions
1. For a version without the timer what would you like to happen if you are just completely stuck on a word? Hints to reveal letters or skip the word?
2. For those who like the timed version would you prefer to continue when you miss a word and then get a final score out of 18?
I’d prefer a timer, but when it runs out of time, you just don’t get credit for the word.
You click next and it goes to the next word.
I don’t want hints but I can see how others might want that. But you still don’t get credit for hints. Or it shows “x hints used”
Final score can show that you got the first N words in <30s (as it is now), and you can have other stats:
* Total number of consecutive words (even if over time)
* Total number of words
* total words <30 seconds
* Plus whatever hint based metrics you want
Someone replied with "survival mode" which is a great way to phrase it.
Maybe a few different modes? How many can you get out of 18, how long can you last (unlimited), and just a chilled relaxed mode.
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.
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.
1. I'd prefer to reveal letters ... each press of the hint button reveals the position of one random letter.
2. I don't have a preference.
Very cool and well done.
Fun game.
To answer #1, I'd like a 'shuffle' button that re-shuffles the order of the letters.
I'd also appreciate the ability to "bank" the surplus time from the prior words.
Those are all good options.
Also a version in which your unused time is accumulated for future rounds would be interesting
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!
The timer kills this for me too.
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.
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.
It’s the same reason people will instantly close a site with unwanted animations (ads).
But if this game was called “Do A Word Puzzle While Being Distracted By Animated Numbers in Your Peripheral Vision”, that would be alright.
Agree on the timer.
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.
Yeah screw the timer. I can't work under pressure like that when it comes to word games. Maybe other people will enjoy that, but not me.
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.
100% agree. Casual mode would be a winner.
Yep, instead of feeling like a fun puzzle the timer just adds unnecessary pressure and gets me really annoyed.
My guy that’s the whole point of the game. Otherwise it’s too easy
I just want to chill... I have plenty of stress in my life already.
You can still be competitive in "casual mode" using total time used to solve all the words.
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.
> purposeless dumb challenges and difficulty
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.
Yeah. It's just a walk to the mailbox for my brain.
English is not my native tongue. If I had a relaxed mode, that'd be awesome :)
Same. Stopped after two words. Gave me the same feeling as taking a timed software developer screening.
> it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk.
Or maybe don’t even keep score. That’s one of the features which makes be skip these daily games. Not every game needs to be a competition!
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.
I would appreciate the timer not turning red. It's better to be surprised that time's up, rather than be surprised to know it's running out.
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 loved it, i hated it. I'm so bad at this.
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).
Would be nice to have a ‘scramble!’ button so it makes it slightly easier when we get stuck
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:
|X|o|X|X|X|o|o|o|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|o|X| 13/18
Yeah, but also, is it really "18 words" if you don't get there?
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.
I guess HABIT was the expected one here.
Baith was right. But I feel stupid that I couldnt see Habit.
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
A continue that let's you keep playing would be fun. Or maybe different modes (eg hard vs normal)
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".
Pretty frustrating when you find a word, but it's not THE word. Pretty fun otherwise.
tbh this should accept all dictionary matches
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.
The third one in the archive wouldn't accept "tase" or "sate" for "seat".
Going two days back in the archive, "egret" not allowed
"braze" is a very common word, especially if you like bicycles.
Definitely not any less valid or unsatisfying than "zebra".
Ok yes all good examples. Have reverted back ot the large dictionary for now which accepts all these
Why not just only allow a single try, but accept any "real" word?
Interesting idea but too many people mistype / mispell on first attempt (mostly me)
the obvious solution is to not use the words that have an obscure word as anagram. I failed on 'target' because I went for 'regatta'.
> I failed on ‘target’ because I went for ‘regatta’.
Given that those two don’t have the same letters, isn’t that the expected outcome?
That seems only fair. ;-)
quite/quiet
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.
300,000? The Oxford dictionary only contains 171,000!
I guess the wordlist with 300k contains all the different forms a word can have while the 171k count is only the base words.
Haha yeah the 300k list contains so really obscure stuff
Was this by chance inspired by a previous submission (now defunct) that had a similar premise?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536488
Edit: I believe it was transferred to a new domain at https://wordnerd.co/
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).
Very true and it's a bit lazy.
I'm load a short wordlist first and then the longer version async so it doesn't really affect how long until you can start playing.
Waste of bandwidth is true. Cloudflare pages hates me
nice game to start my day. a refresh button to reorder the letter would be great.
Fun game though I wish it left more time for the longer words, also wish we could have the letters in one line and shuffle them
That was really fun. Made it to 16/18. Thank you popmpomsheep.
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 didn’t realize the word “crowd“ only had one vowel until I saw it scrambled!
And I didn't realize "audio" had only one consonant!
I like the time based ness. 30 seconds is plenty of time and one run a day is a nice change of pace from never ending feeds.
Good job, I got 15/18
When I didn't know the word I just mashed the given letters on the keyboard randomly, sometimes I got lucky with it
Maybe the game should limit the number of tries per word?
Could I have the source code so I can plug in the Polish word list? It would make a great training app for Scrabble.
Yeah its just the single index.html file feel free to download it and adapt
It's unobfuscated. Right click, view source, there it is.
You could also probably one-shot your own version of this using any SOTA LLM, it's not terribly complicated (but a nice game idea!).
Just one shot in Claude if you have it or deepseek flash for free.
This could be a cool captcha challenge (without the timer).
That's not how captchas work...
Made it to 9 and then time ran out... I wish it showed me the word that I got stuck on! Argh!!!
It should have shown you!
Pretty cool idea. I think a calendar based UI to go through the archives would be more user friendly than what you have right now.
Yeah for sure I agree just kept it simple for now but will improve if people like it
Fun! But disappointing if you lose early. Maybe let the player continue after failing and showing a final score out of 18.
iPhone bug: double tapping on a letter zooms in the viewport with no way to zoom back out, permanently breaking the page.
Oof yeah thanks! Fixed now
For some reason it made me think of this right away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
Something about not being able to shuffle the tiles makes this hard for me.
This is fun! Could use a short "how it works" blurb on the landing page though :)
Thanks! I thought it was fun to throw people straight into the game without instructions but you think it too unclear?
I did get the first one straight away, so it's not too unclear, but it did induce a short moment of panic, which I'm not sure I'd categorise as fun :P
Fun, that's it. New addiction after daily wordle unlocked
Embarrassed of where I failed (#8). Very cool game though!
If it makes you feel better, I failed on #3. In my defense, I'm running on 2 hours of sleep.
great game, what do you think of adding shuffle?
Nice, this is pretty fun!
Great game, well done
timer removed should be better
Ha fun little game :)
Damn got to 13.
Fun game!
I got stuck on the word corner of all words. Ugh
LAMER is a real word and COLOR is not.
Depends on which side of the pond (or Canadian border?) you're on ;)
> COLOR is not
Huh? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/color
what made you go with 18?
Not the parent, but I just checked and it seems that all $iwords.com are taken for i<18
14 was taken.
I see what you did there. I did a double take when I saw this on the front page of HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
Haha I've never heard of this but lucky i went with 18
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.
The internet is a magical place.
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.
I'm normally terrible at anagrams.
4/18
Enjoying time-based games must be some prey animal adaptation, y'all are probably vegan and have negative canthal tilt.
Skill issue
haha yes. I got 2 and it said come back in 9hours. LOL. Ain't nobody got time for that.
lol