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Travle: A daily game – get between countries in as few guesses as possible
- kuschkufan 3y agoVery easy to cheat in this game, unfortunately - just look at a map elsewhere. The game itself is great though, very well done and lots of detail. Could only be better if it would install a ServiceWorker to remind me by push notification every day for the new task.
- kbrackbill 3y agoIt's really easy to cheat in pretty much all of the wordle-alikes, but where's the fun in that?
- petercooper 3y agoAnd you can cheat at Wordle pretty easily with grep -iE '^$' /usr/share/dict/words... (or, back in the day, just look at the source) but that's not really the point if you want to just enjoy the game.
- kuschkufan 3y agoPeak HN, where "just look at the source" is the same level easy as "look at the map". ;) But I agree
- petercooper 3y agoHey, I like to think of myself as peak HN :-P I imagine things have changed since the NYT took over, but the original Wordle notoriously had the word list in plain text in its single HTML file - I don't think it was even bundled.
- dmd 3y agoWait until you hear how quickly I can complete crossword puzzles by looking at the answer page.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amarant 3y agoThis game is great! Really fun and surprisingly challenging, today's challenge was in one of the parts of the world I'm most unsure about geographically! Unlike the other wordle-like games, I feel like I'm actually learning something with this one! Great work!
- me_bx 3y agoI liked it too. Two somewhat similar games which make me feel like I'm learning something: * Worldle - focused on geography https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ * Tradle - with a touch of macroeconomics https://oec.world/en/tradle/
- duiker101 3y agoCongrats on the game! Looks great! Mildly off-topic: how do you get Google ads on a website like this? Google loves to reject my websites due to a lack of content even if the content is a game itself or a Web app rather than some content-heavy website
- charles_f 3y agoFun game. I'd love to be able to play more than one round a day.
- thekevinscott 3y agoAgreed. I downloaded a wordle clone to get around this restriction too
- strstr 3y agoGame trusts the local clock. You can change the datetime. I did this to try older puzzles.
- lifebeyondfife 3y agoYou can use the waybackmachine. This works for Worldle as well. http://web.archive.org/web/20231127182010/https://imois.in/games/travle/ http://web.archive.org/web/20231127182010/https://imois.in/g...
- standardUser 3y agoBookmarked. I was so proud to get it in the minimum number of guesses, but turns out 56% of players did that!
- dunefox 3y agoThe German translation for share is not Aktie (like Stock Exchange) but teilen (like send to someone).
- vintermann 3y agoThat nicely illustrates something I've tried to explain SO many times to developers and "content creators". I know machine translation exists. I know how to call on it if I need it. But if you turn it on without asking me, much of the time I'll be translating back into English to try to understand what the hell you were trying to say. You make more work for me, not less. Better machine translation won't fix this, if you don't give it context. You could have the best machine translation in the world, but if you just gave it the word "Share" and told to translate to German, it would have had to make a guess on whether you meant share as in stock or share as in distribute. The worst is, some sites like YouTube seem to reward creators for "localised content", pushing them to make garbage translations of things I can perfectly well read, and serving up that instead of the original.
- rgmerk 3y agoHmmm. Neat, but I wonder whether it’s going to get pretty repetitive once you know a few key bottlenecks (eg the countries of Central America).
- geephroh 3y agoBut that just means that it's done its job in teaching you geography!
- Fatnino 3y agoIt can also sometimes throw in some truck questions. Like go from A to B but do not pass C
- rchard2scout 3y agoI read (in the YouTube comments on GeoWizards video) that those are the Saturday games.
- paxys 3y agoNeat game, but I wish so many of them popping up these days wouldn't just try to blindly copy the "one game a day" formula. Especially ones that can be algorithmically generated to have basically infinite puzzles. Just because Wordle went viral in that way doesn't mean yours will as well. I'd love to keep playing this one, but the chances of me remembering to come back day after day are next to zero.
- georgebcrawford 3y agoAgreed, I enjoy this one more than any other but only remembered it because I saw it here after seeing on Tildes a few days ago.
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoYup, I might've actually started playing this. but with the one game a day thing no reason to bother.
- gbear605 3y agoMy friends have been enjoying sharing their results in this one with each other over the last few days, so I see the value. An unlimited mode would be nice, but I think I’d grow bored of that a lot sooner.
- anotheraccount9 3y agoSuper game, but after it's done, how do you restart the game (world level)?
- pedrogpimenta 3y agoyou don't. you get a new one every day
- holoduke 3y agoI once sat in an airplane without anything to read or listen to for 10 hours. I decided to learn all countries in the world from the promo magazine you always have in the airplane. Never really useful till this game :)
- hyperific 3y agoLove this! Reminds me a lot of the wikipedia speed run game which is another fav https://wikispeedrun.org/ https://wikispeedrun.org/
- davidw 3y agoOddly it decided to show me the game in Italian. I have my browser set up to prefer either English or Italian, but English would have been fine, really, and its Italian translation is not that great. Still, neat game though.
- ptrrrrrrppr 3y agoI dont see any way to share feedback via website, but the Polish translation has so many errors it is hard to even guess what the rules are
- softg 3y agoI enjoyed this game, it made me feel better about myself until I tried France and was unable to think of a single départment between the Pyrénées and Marseille. Are you planning to add other countries? A pan european version with german states, french and spanish regions etc. could be interesting.
- neoromantique 3y agoI enjoyed it and then I realised that you need to wait till next day to play again. I'll have forgotten it ever existed in an hour, weird marketing gimmick I'd say.
- foooobaba 3y agoThis is cool. I also like the site in general, has a nice feel to it.
- FredPret 3y agoReally love this!
- Probiotic6081 3y agoLove it! Can't wait for tomorrow (7 minutes from now.) The way I want to go "from A to B" made me think you had to guess the countries in order, which is not the case apparently.
- mckn1ght 3y agoLove this. Finally all the time I spent on Sporcle country quizzes is paying off!
- pmontra 3y agoIntetesting feature: transfer statistics between devices with a code. So they are keeping stats on their server without an account but with a way to identify devices. Or the stats could be on the device until the transfer procedure starts. I'm on my phone so I can't check what they are doing. Then you type that code to another device and they'll be able to link the two of them. "transfer" should mean that the stats are no more on the original device. That would mean that they delete the cookie (or whatever) and any trace of that device on their server. Maybe it is even possible to make the two devices communicate between each other without going through a server. I think it's been done in web conferencing but it's too late on the night to research the matter.
- oisincar 3y agoDev here: Actually the scores are all scored client-side! The 'transfer code' contains all of your past game data, encoded using Huffman encoding (into a base-64 string) to store it in as few characters as possible.
- Fervicus 3y agoIt's a lot of fun. Nicely done!
- tigerstyle 3y agoI’ve been playing this game ever since I saw it on Geowizard! The game seems to update dynamically based on what countries you choose. Does anyone know how it determines best path between countries as you update your guess? Underlying graphs?
- oisincar 3y agoDev here: Graphs, exactly (Dijkstra's)! There's a little about scoring in the extra-info/ faq page.
- MaximilianEmel 3y agoWhy didn't Kuwait count for today's challenge (Bangladesh -> Yemen)? Is it calculated by the least countries inbetween, rather than shortest distance? If this is the case, I could see this making some weird paths, such as always going through Russia, if going West <-> East.
- esrauch 3y agoIt's definitely just about number of countries. It's a reasonable choice for a game in isolation but also it would be a lot more complicated to find distances of a path that only passes through a list of countries (including convex countries, enclaves, etc). By doing raw number of countries it only needs to know the abstract connectivity of countries for a classic path through a graph. It happens that under that metric Kuwait is never useful for a path since it only borders two countries which also border each other directly.
- hermannj314 3y agoSimilarily, getting from Delaware to Florida requires skipping South Carolina (on the usa puzzle). Now I know the rules. I've driven that route so many times but failed to get the optimum puzzle score. Good concept and makes you have to think more precisely about borders I guess.
- Fatnino 3y agoYou can skip both Carolinas if you want. Tennessee and Alabama will get you there in the same optimal number of steps.
- sltkr 3y agoWhat's with the language detection on this site? I've set my browser languages to "English (US)" first, and "Dutch" second. Instead of showing me the English-language version of the site, I get an absolutely atrocious auto-translation into Dutch instead (barely intelligible; way worse than Google Translate would produce). Why are you even looking at my language preferences if you don't respect my preference, of getting English first? And maybe don't do secondary languages if you haven't done a tiny bit of quality assurance on the translation?
- mainpassathome 3y agocould be location based if you’re in the netherlands?
- MassPikeMike 3y agoI'm on an Android phone in the US and got Chinese. I do have a Chinese keyboard installed, maybe that could have something to do with it.
- nyagaga 3y agoI confirm, also poor quality translation for Italian.
- 3y ago
- matisseverduyn 3y ago> "The idea of an unlimited travle, and/or allowing players to catch up on previous games is something I'd like to add" Maybe that and also switch to "capitals" mode to use the capitals of the countries instead of the country names. I used to use another "popular map guessing site" almost daily to practice world capitals until one of their pop-up adverts hijacked the page's onload and redirected me to another site. Travle seems much more effective than rote memorization, as it's practical.
- geniium 3y agoVery nice! How can I restart a new game? Not easy to find the button.. couldn't find it
- rchard2scout 3y agoThere's a new game every day. In the meantime, you can try other versions with US states, UK counties, and many others.
- geniium 3y agoOh that wasn't clear. I thought I could play more times on the world map
- johnhamlin 3y agoLove this! Another idea for hard mode would be requiring you to guess a contiguous series of countries.
- karim79 3y agoCool game! When I first glanced at the title of the post what sprung to mind was the good old days of gaming, particularly "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" from Broderbund[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego_(video_game_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego_(video_game_se... EDIT: Post of the title -> title of the post
- mahami 3y agoI might be mistaken, but similar quizzes exist on the glorious quizzing site jetpunk.com[1] You can also play those multiple times a day. I will update the comment with the link to the particular quiz(zes) if and when I find it/them. [1] https://www.jetpunk.com/ https://www.jetpunk.com/
- jasonkester 3y agoWell that was frustrating. It marked me down for taking a realistic route from Canada to Argentina, following the main road that I’ve actually taken in real life. It’s “ideal” solution cut through a bunch of windy jungle to bypass El Salvador, then took a quick detour across the Amazon from Colombia into Brazil to avoid the 3000 miles of straight multi lane highway along the west coast. Because that went through more countries. They either need to fix their thing to favour realistic routes or give much clearer instructions that this a game that treats countries as puzzle pieces with absolutely no other context.
- seanhandley 3y agoThe goal is to travel through the fewest countries possible, not the most direct land route.
- OscarCunningham 3y agoSince you have to stay on land the Darién Gap is going to be a problem in any case.
- d--b 3y agoDid you think that you may be the only person who thought that this was about taking realistic routes? Maybe if you had tried yesterday (Bangladesh to Yemen), you'd found it clearer.
- jasonkester 3y agoI imagine it would have dinged you for going through Kuwait, where there is a road, instead of heading straight across the desert of Iraq. The game is literally named "Travel". So it's annoying that it penalizes you for your knowledge of traveling between places. It would have been much cooler if they had leaned in to that and prioritized routes that you could actually do on public land/sea transport. That's way more interesting to me than being able to look at a map and notice that Brazil does in fact have borders with both Colombia and Argentina (one of which is non-navigable).
- 3y ago
- jpsouth 3y agoThis is awesome - I’ve sent it to a friend of mine who’s currently most of the way through today’s route! I can’t say I solved it, Central American geography isn’t my strong point, but I will be trying the alternate game modes throughout the day.
- rimeice 3y agoAddicted.
- whycome 3y agoWas this translated into English? Some of the instructions and word choices are odd and hard to parse. “ Jumps that require you go nearer other countries don't count - e.g. France <-> French Guiana “
- krauses 3y agoThe game is great. URL is horribly hard to remember. This is my third time having to come back to hacker news to search for it. Yes I could bookmark, or be more deliberate about committing it to memory, instead I’d rather write this so you know what happens when you don’t see return visits going up.