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Show HN: Killer Crossword - A crossword puzzle variation with no clues
- lovehashbrowns 4y agoThis is really fun! Seems like I’ll enjoy this more than a regular crossword puzzle because it has less of a focus on cultural references.
- danieltait 4y agoThank you!
- bombcar 4y agoVery nice! But the white for a placed letter and gray for a original letter is too close - I was trying to figure out why no word would work when I realized I had placed the T - it wasn't an original letter.
- danieltait 4y agoGood feedback thanks, I'll try some different colours or ways to mark the originals.
- pwinnski 4y agoExcellent. This focuses on word recognition, which is a large part of vocabulary, omitting the need for meaning. I suppose it also provides chances for people who don't know words to work out new words based on phonetic patterns and which letters remain. Great stuff!
- vehementi 4y agoI despaired until I saw that it actually confirms something is right and locked in. Nice!
- 0xC0ncord 4y agoMy girlfriend and I just did this and had a lot of fun! There were a lot of times where I thought I figured a word out but ended up having to go through about 5 or 6 really good guesses before landing on the right one. Sometimes little word games like these really can test my vocabulary.
- TylerE 4y agoNot sizing properly to my screen https://i.imgur.com/CdIkpVA.png https://i.imgur.com/CdIkpVA.png
- danieltait 4y agoThanks for the report. What device / browser is this? You should also be able to zoom the puzzle in and out with mouse wheel, trackpad two fingers or touch screen pinch in the meantime
- TylerE 4y agoChrome on a Macbook
- scottlu2 4y agoLove it - my wife and I enjoying playing that - on an iPad. Nicely made.
- fcoury 4y agoIt's really a lot of fun, well done!
- banana_giraffe 4y agoKind of the inverse of a diagramless crossword. Nice concept, well executed. Reminds me of Knotwords.
- waxpancake 4y agoKnotwords is a delight, highly recommend checking it out if anyone likes this concept. https://noodlecake.com/games/knotwords/ https://noodlecake.com/games/knotwords/
- benji-york 4y agoI really like it! I feel like it could use some scoring mechanism. I want to feel friction against just making guesses until something works. Post-completion edit: It does have a time-based scoring mechanism. That didn't register with me at first. I continue to feel that it could use come mechanism to dissuade low-effort guessing.
- benji-york 4y agoThe keyboard control is quite nice.
- jciochon 4y agoReally enjoyed this. One issue: sharing my results was not great. Pasting in iMessage gave the result text and the image; pasting in discord only gave the text; pasting in telegram only gave the image. Not sure if this is even your fault, but it doesn’t have as nice of an experience there as Wordle (which I assume you’re trying to emulate).
- maxique 4y agoIf the link had https:// https:// before it, Discord and Telegram would do the same link preview that iMessage does
- naet 4y agoKind of fun the first time, but I think I prefer a normal crossword. Seems like the only way to progress is to pick an unfinished word and then do tons of guesses back to back of all the possibilities until one turns green, which starts to get boring when there are a lot of possibilities. Feels more like stenography or data entry than playing a game at that point where you're just typing 10+ guesses without any investment in any one of them. For example, when I tried the larger version, I got to a point of a 2/3 filled word: _ET. I then had to sit and enter: -bet -get -jet -let -met -net -pet -set -vet -wet and finally, I got to the word: yet. And that's not even including some less common but still valid words I would guess like ret and tet, which I'm not sure are off the table as possibly valid entries. It just felt like a chore more than a puzzle to get that word, and I have to repeat it over and over for the other words. Maybe as you get to a close the letter pool gets a bit smaller so you have less guesses, but that's only after you've guessed out a significant portion of the puzzle. Wordle avoids this by giving you information on your guesses, making them feel less like a huge string of purely random guesses. Crosswords give you cryptic clues that aren't obvious, but make you feel like any guess was based on deductive reasoning rather than some brute force attempt. Still, nice job on building and releasing the project! And it sounds like other commenters are enjoying it more than I am, so maybe I'm just a stick in the mud or I like word games too much and have too much time invested in them.
- sbf501 4y agoI agree with this. Three-letter words that dangle by one letter are just a chore. There needs to be a balance between discoverability and guessing. Perhaps the auto-generator needs to evaluate the discoverability somehow... Also, why no cookie keeping your trend? That's what keeps me coming back: not wanting to break a streak! (Not to promote dark patterns or anything.) Also also, nice UX. I found it easy to navigate, edit, and delete.
- akudha 4y agoOne way to make it more enjoyable could be to do it by topic - this way the universe of words would be much smaller, instead of the entire dictionary. Topics could be - music, baseball, food etc
- mcdonje 4y agoSeems like a lot of commenters like it, so there's probably an audience. I don't think it'll be a hit with the main crossword community because the crossword constructors put a lot of humor and cleverness in the clues, which is a major draw. The personal touch makes it seem like you're in a community of clever people who are trying to entertain each other. I suppose this would be a good learning aid for students who are learning vocabulary.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ianferrel 4y agoFun. Should probably not let people delete the initially-provided letters. I did so accidentally at one point and got very confused for a long time.
- danieltait 4y agoOooh that shouldn't have happened. Please send feedback if it happens again
- pixxel 4y agoNice job.
- sleepypizza 4y agoJust did the basic one :) Going to ask my girlfriend to bring her laptop to my apartment tonight and race her on the hard one. Not sure if that's a piece of observable behavior that helps you figure out a market / how you want to grow this, but definitely speaks to the kind of delight I've got out of your prototype!
- sleepypizza 4y agoWe ended up just doing it together haha it was great -- we cooked beet pasta and then did this while we ate it
- someguy5344523 4y agoThis is a very neat idea! My problem is with the layout: why is there a black area below the crossword, where if I drag the crossword there the crossword disappears? That area should be a lot smaller
- guimonz 4y agoNice concept, but at some point you get forced into brute forcing your solution, which isn't as much fun.
- antonymy 4y agoI did very little guessing on the regular puzzle, which took me a little over 6 minutes, but the master-level one did require some brute force at first and took me much longer to finish. Once I got rolling, though, I was able to solve it intuitively. It's more like a sudoku but instead of mathematic logic you rely on your knowledge of English vocabulary and spelling. It may not have traditional clues but by giving you the pool of letters for all words it gets progressively easier as you fill in the grid and eliminates certain possibilities out of hand. The only real issue is getting your initial foothold, especially if the grid's pre-filled letters are mostly common and not helpful in placement. Having a pre-filled J is much more useful than, say, a prefilled E.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoA lot of comments seem as if they believe this to be a novel crossword type? I thought I'd seen the exact format in The Times (of London)?
- eterm 4y agoFun but very frustrating controls. If you mis-type a letter in one box and it's the only letter left of that letter then you can't type it elsewhere which gets me right in a muddle. Also the delete key doesn't appear to work, only the backspace. Tab really ought to tab through the words as well as arrow keys, which don't cursor to filled in letters which is also frustrating. I'd like to be able to type a whole word, including over-typing the letters provided. I'd recommend playing around with the guardian crossword for inspiration of a control scheme. But fun core idea!
- danieltait 4y agoThanks. for the feedback. I agree the controls are not great especially on desktop. Will improve!
- joe__f 4y agoSeems like the pool of words is quite small; for example with T_RN it was clear that o or u would be the answer, even though a and e also give valid words
- nmstoker 4y agoHow is the Share feature meant to work? It seems to be failing within Android Firefox Nightly (nothing gets copied and for a split second the positioned letters blink away then return)
- _dain_ 4y agoIt doesn't let me enter the letter P.
- adwi 4y agoSuggestion: allow user to click the area with the clue to switch between down/across typing, ala NYT
- te 4y agoVery fun. Didn't realize I was being timed? When did the timer start? Maybe show it on screen real-time? Increases the pressure!
- propter_hoc 4y agoIt won't displace actual crosswords for me - the point of crosswords is the clues, not the grid. Still, it's really neat and I enjoyed it, particularly the smaller version. Congrats!
- austinjp 4y agoEnjoyable, thanks! The yellow colour is barely discernable on my crappy old Android, could stand to be more distinct. Orange or pink, perhaps?
- haasted 4y agoA bit late to the discussion, but I think the game shows promise and could perhaps end up being a commute-distraction for me in daily life. I think you should consider taking a page out of the book of Wordle and threemagicwords.app and at least mark correctly placed letters, even though the entire word is not yet correct. That would provide some kind of incremental progress, eg in the situation where I'm trying to guess "*ea*", which has the possibility of being tear, fear, teat, rear, read, lead, mead etc etc. As long as a correct dictionary word is provided, the user should receive some kind of reward.
- danieltait 4y agoThanks for the feedback and kind words! I'll have a think on incremental progress as mentioned
- AMSLittleGrace 4y agoI like this! I would actually like an option to disable the feature where it marks a word when it's 100% correct, because it makes it too tempting to just "brute force" one word at a time instead of trying to solve the whole puzzle using the letters available. (As in, I think it would be more fun to have a "hard mode" where you do the small puzzle with no feedback at all until it's 100% correct, instead of just doing a larger puzzle.)
- _Microft 4y agoSuggestion: also allow the "delete" key to remove a letter from the board. "Backspace" does that too but it clashs with "backwards in browser history" for people who have configured it that way. I had fun solving it by the way!
- LynkS 4y agoMaster crossword today has errors: Final solution contains word "RREE" and has one T left, and -1 R in the letter bank. Great game btw.