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Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?
- danieltait 4y agoThis was a really fun game to make. We've been playing scrabble together for years so it's nice I'm finally competent enough to code this online version. I posted it on reddit and now over 1000 people are playing against my dad everyday haha.
- anentropic 4y agoIt's nice! My only gripe is: any time you click away from the tab, when you click back to it it resets the screen (shuffles the pile and clears any letters you had placed)
- danieltait 4y agoHmm yes ok I just removed the refresh now. The reason it was there is some days I opened the tab on my iphone and for some reason it still showed the yesterdays result rather than the new day's letters. Will have a think of a better way to force the refresh of the letters on a new day.
- robertlagrant 4y agosetTimeout() with a timeout calculated to fire after midnight?
- jfindley 4y agoThis is still happening btw - if I quickly switch to another tab it resets the board completely, giving me a different puzzle in practice mode. This makes it sadly unusable for me.
- danieltait 4y agoSorry! I had only changed for the daily. Removed from practice and play now as well
- wizzwizz4 4y ago> The reason it was there is some days I opened the tab on my iphone and for some reason it still showed the yesterdays result rather than the new day's letters. This'll be the Cache-Control header interacting with tab resume: rather than setting that to expire after X time has elapsed, set it to expire at time=T, and the browser will¹ fetch the new page instead. You'd increase the effectiveness of this technique (and reduce your bandwidth requirements for repeat players) if you made `/daily` a static page, and factored out those JavaScript variables into a separate file, fetched with `fetch` or `XMLHttpRequest` (or even a `<script>` tag, like `wordlist.js` is). If I've configured my browser to behave otherwise (e.g. it takes me longer than a day to solve each puzzle), I really don't want it overriding that and resetting on me: that would make me very sad. ¹: usually. Firefox Session Restore behaves differently – but that's expected behaviour. Every website ever behaves like that: it's what I expect, because I expect to be able to close my browser and open it again and still have more-or-less the same pages available. After all, I've got a refresh button, but no un-refresh button.
- anentropic 4y agoA couple more ideas: - could be nice to have it calculate and show the score of the word you have currently placed - when you place a tile on the DL or TL you can't see where the DL and TL are any more (I think on Scrabble board they have little triangles that stick out past the edges?) - I found myself wanting to know the 'target' score, but I guess that would change the experience a bit
- danieltait 4y ago1. It shows the score just above the word if it is valid! 2. Yes agree thats a good idea. 3. I could add a new game mode where it shows you the target score, but I'm going to keep dad's score hidden for my own entertainment haha
- TheHumanist 4y agoCould just do a minimal outer box shadow/glow around the tile in the color of the DL or TL to remind people where they are once letters are laid down.
- Symbiote 4y agoIt wasn't clear to me that I needed to start from the leftmost box.
- anentropic 4y agosame here :)
- JeanMarcS 4y agoWell, this is very frustrating. I really wanted to play, I like the idea of competiting with your dad. But as a non native english speaker, my vocabulary is too low to give me a chance. Anyway, great idea ! (I don't know if you are aware, but in French speaking countries, competition are mostly played this way, everyone with the same letters. At the end everybody got its own points and the best word is placed on the board)
- danieltait 4y agoSend me a french dad and a french dictionary and I can add it this afternoon haha! Wow no I didn't know that is how the french play. I believe it is a much fairer version of the game and better tests the players skill
- playingalong 4y agoIt's called Duplicate Scrabble: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_Scrabble https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_Scrabble
- erickhill 4y agoSo are you like Desmond on LOST where every day, after you and your dad play, you have to run to the computer to type in the latest Dad-Word to keep the machine alive?
- gareve 4y agoi cannot find an explanation of the TL & DL tiles
- logicallee 4y agoMe neither. Can someone explain the rules? (What do the red and blue tiles mean? How do you play?)
- Gasp0de 4y agoDouble Letter, Triple Letter (I think). It triples the amount of points you get for the letter that is on it. So try to put valuable letters on that spot.
- IanCal 4y agoTap the letter to place them down. If what you put down is a real word it should tell you how many points you score. Each letter has a number on, that's the score for using it. DL and tl are double and triple letter tiles respectively. You get double or triple the points. I'm not sure if they added it but in the real game you'd get 50 bonus points if you use all your letters.
- danieltait 4y agoI haven't added the bonus 50 points but maybe I should?
- logicallee 4y agoThanks for the fix (TL & DL changed to double letter and triple letter), now it's much clearer.
- IanCal 4y agoThose I expect will be double letter and triple letter tiles. You get double or triple the points for the letter on the tile.
- 4y ago
- Lapsa 4y agono
- mordae 4y ago[flagged]
- whutno 4y agoI tried playing "VERB" with the "V" on the first triple letter tile, but when I tapped Submit, nothing happened. This was on the current daily puzzle. Is this a bug or am I doing it wrong?
- sebstefan 4y agoYeah you did it wrong, dad's gonna wipe the floor with "verb"! But also you have to start on the first square
- charlesharvey 4y agoI think you have to start the word on the first tile.
- danieltait 4y agoYou have to start the word in the first square. I've just added an error message to highlight that when you try submit. Thanks for the feedback!
- TheHumanist 4y agoOh so it doesn't have to use all seven squares. Interesting
- tobr 4y agoSome unstated things that I didn’t understand, if it helps make the game better: - You don’t have to use all letters. - You do have to start the word all the way to the left. - It has to be a valid scrabble word before you get any feedback at all. I think you should try to give much more feedback when the player tries different things, so they have a chance to figure out the rules.
- danieltait 4y agoI've added an instructions page now, thanks!
- Karellen 4y ago
- noduerme 4y agoLike, this is neat. And fun. Small, simple and chill. So what I'm about to say is not specifically a knock against your game. What I've noticed lately on HN is this weird split where everything has to either be super basic - like, this game could have been literally written with BASIC in 1984 - or else it has to be an abstract conversation about the future of AI. With very little in the middle. What would be in the middle? I don't know, like, games that people spent a couple years making. Things with awesome graphics. Or small games that showcased interesting new game mechanics. The rise (resurrection?) of the one-shot HTML game, I get it, it's a rebuke of all the overly complicated stuff. Concept over execution. Wordle got bought up, right? But aren't we already on the long tail of that? Again, this is not a knock - this would be fun to make in spare time, and it would be fun to play if I had spare time. I'm just wondering why there's this decisive move away from tacking up things that took a long time to make. And I'll be willing to sound bitter: For example, I posted a project here not too long ago that I worked on for a year. It was too complicated or posted at the wrong time. I have several others that are more sophisticated, that I know now are just too much for anyone here to look at and upvote. On the other side, discussion (practically worship) of higher-level usage of enormously complicated things like GPT seem to drastically outpace discussion of the underlying mechanics. If every little piece of code you put on the internet is a card trick (and it is) then this is a forum about magic, and we should stop being proud that we can do a trick, and start talking about how tricks work and how to make them better.
- jerrre 4y agoInteresting observation about the split of subjects One similarity is: both don't take too long to create. The AI it self might, but the thought about it don't
- noduerme 4y ago> both don't take too long to create That's what I've been noticing, and why I gravitate toward those comments about AI which are like, "have you thought about using an if/then for this thing?"
- TheHumanist 4y ago
- sebstefan 4y agoThat's really fun, it's somehow totally doing something to know I'm in competition with someone's dad Two suggestions, you need to put an actual URL in the "share" text in the clipboard. With https:// https:// before the domain. It's so that people can click the link on instant messaging platforms for viral traffic Then, I need some dad lore
- airza 4y agoIt's missing the 50 point bonus for playing all 7 letters :(
- Tade0 4y agoI can't hope to beat an experienced native speaker at this game, but it might be useful for expanding my vocabulary. Case in point: my language doesn't really have a word for "almonry" - there's usually no dedicated space for collecting/dispensing alms. By far the best Scrabble player I ever encountered was a former corporate drone in his 50s, who hiked 40km+ daily in the Carpathians and was in charge of maintaining a mountain shelter there. When he wasn't out hiking, chopping wood or collecting water he would be sitting in the common room absolutely dominating the Scrabble board. I don't know his story and he didn't talk much about himself, but with age I increasingly get the appeal of such a life.
- danieltait 4y agoYou can also play against an easier ai here - https://dadagrams.com/play https://dadagrams.com/play
- Symbiote 4y agoWithout context, I doubt many native English speakers would know the meaning of "almonry". From [1], they seem obsolete well before any colonization, so it's probably only British people with an interest in church history. "Alms" is already fairly obscure, [2] puts it at word frequency 44625. Almonry is not in the top 333,333 words. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almonry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almonry [2] http://norvig.com/ngrams/ http://norvig.com/ngrams/
- nebulous1 4y agoBe wary of the top answers it will give you. Quite a lot of the top answers will technically be words in English but are essentially completely unused and most people won't even know or understand them. For instance, today's top words: Obvert - I know this one but it isn't too common. Overt - This was my answer, it's not uncommon. Over - Common Evo - I've never seen this used as a word other than a name. Bevor - Apparently this is medieval neck armour. Uncommon. Ouvert - From ballet according to the internet. Uncommon, although I know it as a French word. Note this isn't the game's fault, they're all in the scrabble dictionary it's using. These words are only useful if you want to win scrabble, not if you want to speak English.
- ManiAbod 4y ago[dead]
- mandmandam 4y ago[dead]
- amenghra 4y agoNice game! nit: I found the sentence "you found the nth highest scoring word" a little confusing since there can be >n words with a higher score (e.g. there could be 6 words scoring 12 and you found the 2nd highest scoring word with a score of 11).
- danieltait 4y agoThanks! Hmm yes what do you think could be a better way? Just the number of points?
- amenghra 4y agoYou could just drop the sentence since the top scoring words are shown below. Other nits: - Gray the submit button until the word is valid, otherwise it's unclear why clicking on the submit button doesn't do anything. - If you are trying to find a word and switch tabs, things get reset when you come back. - If you place tiles forming a word, a space, random tiles: you can submit the first set of letters. IMHO, it shouldn't let you submit if you have spaces between tiles. - Display the best word I have found so far, but let me keep trying other tiles.
- taejo 4y agoThe usual thing in this case is to call it the 7th highest-scoring word (but call all of those above it the highest-scoring)
- shawabawa3 4y agoI much prefer how it is currently The important thing is not that there are 6 better words, but there is 1 better score (i.e. you got the second best score possible)
- the_imp 4y ago"You found the Nth highest word score"
- komali2 4y agoAnybody got a better word than overt for 17 points for today's? Also I would love to play that IRL against my own dad immediately after him placing "over," he'd be furious lol
- Symbiote 4y agoWhen you submit it tells you the "top words today". ROT13: Pheeragyl gur irel orfg jbeq vf boireg sbe na nqqvgvbany cbvag. Terccvat /hfe/funer/qvpg/jbeqf V qb abg frr nalguvat orggre.
- onetokeoverthe 4y ago[dead]
- almara 4y agoI love the different computer characters, Elefata? haha! The different difficulty levels are really well made. Fun game.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PeterWhittaker 4y agoNit: it indicated I had chosen the 3rd highest scoring word, and listed a Latin word as first. Don’t normal scrabble words preclude foreign words?
- PeterWhittaker 4y agoIn another case, one word it proposed as higher scoring was “vizy”, with the wiktionary page being their “this page doesn’t exist yet” 404…
- Symbiote 4y agoThe top word for today's puzzle is an English word. http://norvig.com/ngrams/ http://norvig.com/ngrams/ says it's the 28462-most-frequent English word, slightly more frequent than pronounce, lactating, aquamarine, sedimentation and slime.
- PeterWhittaker 4y agoWhich word was that? I encountered this particular word (sadly, I do not remember the word) doing practice rounds.
- PeterWhittaker 4y agoAlso, I just noticed that the practice rounds and the daily dadagram use different tiling.
- FujiApple 4y agoThis is great, good luck with the inevitable NYT buyout :) One nit, the letters could snap the grid a bit more aggressive, I found I frequently had letter “miss” the grid and have to drag them again (on an iPad).
- codethief 4y ago> This is great, good luck with the inevitable NYT buyout :) How much do you think will his dad make at NYT?
- nyerp 4y agoLove it!! But you've GOT to improve the sharing feature. This is a great, accessible daily game. Connect it with Facebook, or at least give people something they can cut-and-paste without having to open an email client! And the information you provide below is good (it provides a bit of "braggy" info without giving the answer away) but I would make it more conversational, e.g., "I beat Dad!" and then "I beat Dad again!" and then "I'm on a roll... I beat Dad 3 times in a row!" and add a call to action like "Can you beat Dad too? Try here: https://dadagrams.com https://dadagrams.com". The "Dad" emoji is chef's kiss. Definitely keep that in the share message. For reference, here's the current share message (minus the great emoji, which apparently HN does not support): #dadagrams14 Today: Won by 2 points All time: Winning by 2 points Daily streak: 1 https://dadagrams.com https://dadagrams.com
- shawabawa3 4y ago> But you've GOT to improve the sharing feature. This is a great, accessible daily game. Connect it with Facebook, or at least give people something they can cut-and-paste without having to open an email client! They're using the "Wordle" share method which worked insanely well, precisely due to the fact it didn't try to share with facebook or anything annoying, you just copy paste into an IM client
- nyerp 4y agoThat's not correct, based on my experience. Yes, you could copy-and-paste the "results" page, but that contains the answer, so it's no good for sharing. To get the actual "share" text (using Chrome on Windows 11), I had to open an email client when prompted and then cut-and-paste the text from the email the game created.
- llimllib 4y agosame on mac - I had to open it in Notes
- shawabawa3 4y agoweird, for me it copied the sharing text
- GNOMES 4y agoReally fun! I beat your dad by 2 points lol. Feature that is missing vs actually playing Scrabble is the ability to play a fake word if other players do not call you out on it. I wonder if you could find a list of common misspelled words or fake words to allow, or could have some logic that compares the percentage word is misspelled by, and have the computer call it out as fake if it is over say 25% misspelled or something.
- sverona 4y agoI have never met an AI that doesn't have the dictionary built in. If you want to play phonies check Woogles.
- dbg31415 4y agoCute! But doesn’t work in Firefox Focus. The submit button on a round can’t be pressed.
- meganlawson 4y agoI saw this first somewhere, not HN.
- dbg31415 4y agoIt's really cute! I'd change up the UX a bit. 1 - For the drag and drop, I'd keep the original letter in place, and just make the original slightly transparent as you drag. Reason being, as you drag on a phone you can't see the original letter since your finger is on it... so leaving the original as an indicator is good. https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path=/story/core-draggable-components-dragoverlay--basic-setup https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path... 2 - For the drag and drop, I would add a a "drop indicator" as you mouse over each square. https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path=/story/core-droppable-usedroppable--multiple-droppables https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path... 3 - For things like "Triple Letter" I would change it up... "x3" -- I know you're going for "Scrabble" but frankly the text is a bit small for older people, who I think make up the "Dads" in your audience. 4 - Instead of "Delete" I would change the word to "Recall" for recalling letters you placed on the board. 5 - For the Colors I would go more vibrant. 6 - For font sizes, bigger is better. https://imgur.com/a/kduZzwl https://imgur.com/a/kduZzwl 7 - For buttons, I would suggest having different colors for different buttons. Having them all black means you have to read through them all... having one as a clear "primary" color helps.
- gowld 4y ago> Dadagrams is a variation of Scrabble I play with my Dad where we both play the same letters each turn. It's also the "newspaper puzzle" version of Scrabble, that your Dad played when he was a child.
- sircastor 4y agoI enjoyed that. And I enjoy that there's a specific competitor (and an abstract "Dad" at that)
- jo6gwb 4y agoI play the NYT mini puzzle against my dad every day. We don't really like wordle but this is super fun!
- itslennysfault 4y agoWell... I'm kinda a jerk for this, but it's also a free lesson on why global variables are baaaaad. Also, I wrote this in seconds and I know it could be more efficient / cleaner. don't @ me. Toss this in your browser's dev console to get the best word available for each puzzle instantly function solvePuzzle(puzzle, words) { const letters = {}; puzzle.forEach(l => { if (!letters[l]) { letters[l] = 0; } letters[l]++; }); let best = ''; words.forEach(word => { if (word.length > puzzle.length) { return; } const has = { ...letters }; for (let i = 0; i < word.length; i++) { if (!has[word[i]]) { return; } has[word[i]]--; } if (word.length > best.length) { best = word; } }); return best; } // lettersarray and wordlist are both globally available solvePuzzle(lettersarray, wordlist);
- pstorm 4y ago> don't @ me I'm @ing you :) This code only checks for the longest word, not the highest scoring word. It neglects the x3 and x2 tile spaces.
- itslennysfault 4y agoFair point.
- whoomp12342 4y agoany way I could send this TO my dad and see how he does?
- layer8 4y agoMaybe add to the “how to play” that you don’t have to use all letters. I thought you have to use all and gave up after a while, before reading comments here discussing actual solution words.
- dunefox 4y agoFor me it was pretty obvious.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dmarlow 4y agoI absolutely love it! Thanks for making it so simple and clean.
- capitainenemo 4y agoAfter trying a few practice rounds. I don't know if the generator is the same for the daily, but I feel like bonus tiles should be left biased since the board requires starting at the left. Many times with the letters given it was impossible to reach any bonuses which reduces the fun a little I feel. Or... perhaps allow starting on any tile to try and arrange letter scoring optimally? That might add something as well.
- danieltait 4y agoHmm yes it is just random right now and agree often they are impossible to reach! Will have a think how and if it should be more weighted
- marymkearney 4y agoWhat if only the 7th and last slot were excluded from the 2x and 3x randomization?
- marymkearney 4y agoThis is really cute. Addictive, even. Which dictionary does it use? Official Scrabble Players Dictionary? Could it say which one in the instructions? There are words in OSPD (ex. fab) that aren't accepted. It also accepts words (ex. oonts, accas) that aren't in OSPD. Can you tell I tried it, um, several times? It's fun.
- danieltait 4y agoThe Collins Scrabble Words 2019 dictionary!
- marymkearney 4y agoOh cool thanks :)
- marymkearney 4y agoCan I charge you my hourly rate for the last hour I just spent? Bookmarking this, more hours will give their lives for the worthy quest of beating your dad.
- marymkearney 4y agoI really love that I spent more time on this, than on the 3 HN articles I read about amping your productivity and forming good habits.
- helsinki 4y agoYes
- aardvark179 4y agoThe colouring of the double and triple letter squares confused me because they are like the colours on a scrabble board but don’t share the same meaning. I thought TROVE would get me 27 points in today’s puzzle but it was only 11. :-( Edit: 27, not 24. Another useful thing would be the ability to view the puzzle and your answer. I had to reverse engineer the squares from the possible scores. :-)
- netterminalgene 4y agoDope game, turned it into a prompt, its been fun trying to optimize it. You are a scrabble word master. The rules of the game are as follows. -- Create the highest scoring word you can with the 7 letters! The word must start in the first square of the board and be at least 2 letters long. 2x and 3x squares double and triple the value of that letter. The total points for your word will appear above a valid word. The letters to point values are represented as a string where the point value follows the letter --- E1R1B3U1O1V4T1 The second square is 3x points, the fifth square is 2x points and the 7th square is 3x points. The word must be a real english word. Lets think step by step.
- m4tthumphrey 4y agoI just tried this and was blown away. Maybe I should start giving this ChatGPT some attention...
- darkerside 4y agoInstead of just click and drag, I would make the tiles pop up into the next available spot when you click on them. It would make the game a lot more effortless and fun to play.
- rglover 4y agoGave me a genuine chuckle when I saw his daily word vs my own. Great game and really fun.
- PaulMest 4y agoI was a huge fan of Scrabble growing up. I like how simple this is and would probably be fun playing with my mom daily for a bit (similar to Wordle). I like your game for what it is, but anchoring it to Scrabble confused me a bit when I first played. It was missing a couple of keys aspects for me: 1) Bingo bonus (+50 for using all of your tiles) 2) Optimizing your tileset so that future turns have a better chance for a bingo. Also, minor nit: the colors for the letter multipliers (purple and red) in your game also confused me because in Scrabble the red x3 is a word multiplier and not a letter multiplier. You could consider using light blue and dark blue if you want to align to the traditional game.
- austinjp 4y agoLove it. Some notes: It seems buggy in several places. First, sharing doesn't work for me at all. Nothing ends up on my clipboard, WhatsApp messages are empty, etc. I'm using Firefox Nightly on Android. Second, I think my opponent when playing the computer skipped a go, since their score didn't increase on one turn and their played word didn't change. If you can get sharing working I'll be playing this regularly :)
- LocalH 4y agoInteresting. #dadagrams15 Today: Won by 5 points All time: Winning by 5 points https://dadagrams.com https://dadagrams.com
- Jamesmoorez 4y ago[dead]
- Jamesmoorez 4y ago[dead]
- now__what 4y agoThis is great! My Scrabble-obsessed parents will love it.
- ngshiheng 4y agoOmg this is one of the best side projects that i've seen on HN. I was so impressed by the UX too.
- whitehexagon 4y agoIt's gone from 'triple letter' to '3x' and is '2x' now double letter or double word, confusing, but thanks for sharing, great fun, at least until NYT buyout ;) Suggestion: dark mode?
- quickthrower2 4y agoCheeky! using the Scrabble trademark in the submission title but keeping it off the site.
- SNBS 4y agoGreat! But what's the difference between "play with dad" and "play with ai"? Is your dad really sitting all the time and playing Scrabble on this site?! :D