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Show HN: Truncate, a word-based strategy game

188 points by liambigelow 3y ago

Truncate is a chess flavoured word game that blends spatial reasoning and wordplay. In puzzle mode, you beat back your NPC opponent's words and take over their territory. Truncate started as a pen and paper game between a friend and I, evolved into a handmade board game, and finally arrived at an online puzzle game. Like any good word game, there is of course a daily mode, shareable with the tried and true grid of emojis We've been playtesting it with friends and family for a few months, which has helped iron out the tutorials and gameplay, and we're finally happy with an MVP worth sharing! Technical deets: The client and server are written in Rust, with the visuals built using egui (as an experiment in Rust's GUI ecosystem). We'd love any feedback!

liambigelow 3y ago
Forgot to mention — it's fully open source at https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate for anyone who likes poking their digital nose around :)
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Can you include text instructions of how to play the game instead of only having an interactive tutorial? I find the slow scroll speed and interactive nature doesn't work as well for me as being able to scan a document. If I forget a specific point it's frustrating to have to go through the whole tutorial again.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  Congratulations on the game, and thanks for choosing to share the source! It would help if it had a license file in the repo in order to express what rights you grant to others
  - liambigelow 3y ago
    Oh good note thanks, my mistake. It should be MIT, I'll add the license today.
- leke 3y ago
  I incorrectly guessed this was a JS coded game.
dwighttk 3y ago
It isn’t really my kinda game but it looks like it could be really good
gus_massa 3y ago
Nitpicking: in the "learn to play" tutorial, in the step to add an e in _nough and _ex versus four, the blue tiles are disconected that is an invalid position. Perhaps you can add a tile somewhere in the middle to conect them.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  aha they totally are, that's more than a nitpick! Will fix, thanks for pointing that out.
akirathedev 3y ago
Congrats on the MVP launch! Love the game, it's awesome!
captn3m0 3y ago
This breaks in lockdown mode on iOS.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Darn. I do believe lockdown mode fully disables WebAssembly, so that makes sense. I don't think there are any significant roadblocks to packaging the game as a native app, so that might be a good push to do so.
FrancoisBosun 3y ago
I enjoyed my game. I had some difficulty playing due to the board not being very wide: many nooks and crannies. In the dictionary, search for « ti » and notice the invalid character in « solfage ». Congrats!
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thank you! Yes, for the puzzles we would up having to constrain the board to a size that wasn't too egregious when sharing emojis... The classic single player has a bit more room to breathe :) (Thanks for pointing out the font — I do have an issue for that (https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/issues/111 https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/issues/111) so it's nice to get validation on its importance)
yakkomajuri 3y ago
This is super cool. My main feedback at this point is about the dictionary. I'd have it be open on the side so I can see the board and use it at the same time. Or, as a half-step, have a shortcut to open it and have ESC close it. Although personally I'd prefer the former. But congrats on this, it's awesome!
- card_zero 3y ago
  Maybe putting down a tile should open the dictionary and look up the words formed, instead of the player having to type them in, and then there should be buttons for "make this move" and "make a different move instead".
  - yakkomajuri 3y ago
    I think this might take away a bit from the "strategy" of the game. Or not so much strategy but the mental fog that plays a role in blunders and the like - the same as how it's harder to get a grasp on your opponent's words at a glance because they're flipped. Just my 2c
    - card_zero 3y ago
      You think it might make life too easy? But it's similar in some Sid Meier games where you can see the outcome of a battle (or the odds) before committing. Besides which, the dictionary is patchy and unpredictable, so I use it on most moves anyway, to strategize around its arbitrary subset of English.
      - liambigelow 3y ago
        Good notes on both fronts, so thanks! We have been on the fence about this (and still are!). One option is to add this kind of UI in a "tutor" mode that starts on, and can be opt-out at some point. Not sold on it yet, but mulling it over.
        sanderjd 3y ago
card_zero 3y ago
The dictionary isn't very good. * Doesn't include useful but rare short words, such as el * Does include obscure or slang words such as stere and jones * But doesn't include their conjugations. I lost due to making steres without checking to see if the game knows the plural (it doesn't).
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thanks for the examples, I'll note them. We did intentionally scale back from the classic wordgame dictionaries (looking at you, Scrabble) due to an overabundance of archaic words that the NPC can play against you — but it does push us into the unfortunate role of dictionary moderators! I'd like to add a button to the dictionary to report words that should be included. For now, we erred on the side of a smaller dictionary since it's less jarring to add words than remove them :) (stere / steres is especially regrettable, sorry!)
  - card_zero 3y ago
    El is just the name of L, yet it's cheaty due to how little use it gets. Obtaining a good word list is hard, I have one saved which is a merging and editing of several freely available ones, including one used in Scrabble competitions and one from some Linux distro, and a few "basic word lists". There will be endless errors like missing plurals and past tenses, as well as the inclusion of things like acronyms that shouldn't be in there at all. And if you prune obscure words but allow the submission of missing words, I guess you'd better keep the list of pruned words around so you can head people off at the pass by pre-filtering their submissions.
    - liambigelow 3y ago
      Our current base list is the intersection of Wordnik's games wordlist and the SCOWL spellchecker — words in both are a definite yes, and SCOWL's capitalization helps us filter out acronyms and proper nouns. We have done some manual massaging beyond that, but not much. Waiting for more feedback like this! You can see the current tranches of dictionary massaging here: https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/tree/main/dict_builder/support_data https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/tree/main/dict_buil...
xpe 3y ago
Rule question: In the tutorial, on the "Combatants" screen: > Only words touching another player's words are involved in a battle. This means you can win battles even though your board contains invalid words. > Try playing playing "TO" against your opponent's "FT". > Even though your board is mostly valid, the only words involved in the battle were "TO" and "FT", so you won and "FT" was removed from the board. This doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that "TO" should only battle the opponent's "F" because the opponent has "TOUR" adjacent to "F". If my interpretation was right, only "F" should have been removed.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  In battles, weak words compromise all of their letters. "TOUR" would be safe, but the "FT" ruins the "T" by making it part of an invalid word — and an invalid word that loses is removed in its entirety. Thanks for pointing it out! It's something we have had come up before, and the sort of thing we keep iterating the tutorial toward explaining better, so we'll take another crack at it!
  - xpe 3y ago
    Thanks for your reply. In your meaning, a 'word' is just a contiguous string of letters in one direction... So in this way a 'word' can be invalid or valid. But (pedantic note) it is a little more specific than that. It includes ALL letters until the edge of the board or space on the board. Right? Do most people consider an invalid word to be a kind of word? I don't think I do, and I think this was the source of my confusion. But I'm not a word-game person per se nor Scrabble expert... this might be obvious to other people.
    - liambigelow 3y ago
      Interesting! This might be our Scrabble bias showing through. Yes, when we say "word" I suppose we're meaning "something that a player has claimed to be a word" by placing contiguous tiles. I'll look at somewhere to clarify language in the tutorial.
Kwpolska 3y ago
I went through the tutorial and it feels like a complicated game. The battle rules feel very complex and hard to remember.
- xpe 3y ago
  I'm just a new player: yeah, I get that. I personally like the rule set, but it would be nice if they could be neatly summarized. Something around this might be a starting point to summarize the battle rules: to win, a player's attacking letter requires two things. (1) All of the attacker's touching words to be valid; (2) At least one attacking word to be 2 letters longer than one of the defender's valid words. (But I don't this is all of it. It probably needs revision.) Aside: I'm not sure what the _minimum_ level of complexity for the rules _could_ be. I get the impression these rules were chosen to make the game more interesting. Having known some game-creators, it is common for game rules to be play tested. But there is always the question of "play tested for what audience?" P.S. I like the game so far. A lot. I see a lot of potential in it, but yeah, it is significantly more complex than Scrabble.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yep, I suspect the "win by 2 letters" thing is a play-tested thing. Simpler would just be "the attacker needs one more letter". But I suspect +2 results in a more fun game, at the cost of being slightly harder to learn the game and reason out the results of each battle. Aside: For instance, +1 is the defender's advantage in Risk, and I always loved the mechanics added by the Lord of the Rings version (and maybe other versions) where you could modify that advantage to anything from +0 (with a "leader" in the attacking army), to +3 (with a leader in a defending army on a tile with a "stronghold"). This is a bit different because it isn't dice rolls, but a similar idea.
- mbrain 3y ago
  I gave up in the middle of the tutorial.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Agreed, but in a good way. Some games are brilliant via simplicity, others are brilliant via more complex but elegantly interlocking rules.
xpe 3y ago
Warning: if you don't know Scrabble words you will be utterly destroyed. For example "REC" is valid: "An abbreviation for recreation". What the f-? HAHA
- card_zero 3y ago
  The npc just won a battle with the word st, defined as "expressing a sudden desire for silence". Hmm, that's apparently sourced from Wiktionary. Wiktionary is great, but has a very broad concept of "word".
  - liambigelow 3y ago
    We source the definitions from Wiktionary, but have a much higher bar for words to count as valid in the game. ST comes up often, as I agree it's one of the iffier words, but even Cambridge claims to to be so: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/st https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/st
    - card_zero 3y ago
      That page only defines it as an abbreviation (for saint, short ton, street, or stone).
      - liambigelow 3y ago
        Ah, 2am reading comprehension on my part. Yes, if we ever remove rather than add to the dictionary in the future I might look to axe it.
        xpe 3y ago
        Yes, please ax "st".
  - xpe 3y ago
    "ST is not a playable word" per https://scrabble.merriam.com https://scrabble.merriam.com
wigster 3y ago
i beat AN with FEN to win - i was expecting to lose due to defender +2 bonus.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Oh! Yes, this is an interesting case. Towns actually slot into the battle as one-letter words, so this case FEN is long enough. It doesn't come up much, but it might deserve elaboration in an "advanced" tutorial since it's unexpected.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Or have you considered not having towns work that way? Seems like a confusing caveat to me, unless there is a good reason for it.
    - liambigelow 3y ago
      Yeah that's probably the best solution.
octopusRex 3y ago
Kudos for creating the game. Reading upside down is difficult. In Scrabble you could turn the board around to face you when it was your turn. Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with? I tried to get through the tutorial , but could not. Maybe simplify the rules or simplify the game before I'd play, but others may enjoy. I do play wordle and other NYTimes word games , and scrabble, so I'm not averse to those types of games. Maybe I should have had a cup of coffee first. I will try again later. But still hats off for creating it. Congratulations.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thanks! And thanks for the great feedback — the tutorial is indeed long, but that just means more (fun) iteration to go! > Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with? Much like us, the NPC can be plagued with a simply terrible hand ;) Again, appreciate the notes!
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Counterpoint: I found the tutorial great for teaching a game that is not super simple, in a good way. I think it would be a mistake to simplify the rules in order to simplify the learning process. I think the rules are elegant, just not straightforward, as is the case for many excellent games. Agreed on the reading-upside-down thing, though I think it's still the right choice. But I suspect it's something anyone playing the game regularly would become adept at very quickly. Maybe just add a quick "rotate board" button / hotkey to use when evaluating the opponent's position. I think my one minor criticism is the "touching the opponent's town" thing. I find that it's not a particularly fun goal. Many such things go with a "war" analogy to add some interest, like an army destroying the opponent's fortress or whatever. If you'd prefer to avoid that (though the "attacking" and "defending" language is already in the game), it could be like you're building a path for a rabbit to get a carrot, or maybe it's water and you're building a bridge to the other side. Or the win state could instead be to eliminate all the opponent's letters. As-is, that would eliminate the fun "racing" mechanic, which would be unfortunate. But perhaps (going back to the bridge idea), the "town" squares could be like bridge supports, and reaching one would knock out anything it is "holding up". So you could still race to knock out the critical "root" support, which would usually win in nearly the same way as currently (but maybe with a few more cleanup moves). Love the game! Hope the ideas are interesting rather than annoying :) Edit to add: Oh! One thing I actually missed in the tutorial (but figured out in the example game) is that words must be valid top-to-bottom or left-to-right. I was confused by the outcome of some battles in my initial games, due to building "valid" words bottom-to-top only to see them defeated by shorter ones. Relatedly, maybe in the "easy" modes, valid words could be highlighted? Then I would have known that when I built "yria" from top-to-bottom, it was not actually the valid word "airy" read from bottom-to-top.
gmargari 3y ago
Really nice game, congrats! Just a small note: I just tried and swapped two identical letters, effectively yielding my turn. Not sure if this allowed by design.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Good point, I think we discussed this in the past and it shouldn't be — which we promptly forgot! Will amend. (and thanks!)
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I hadn't thought of doing this! But yeah, I agree with what you concluded previously - passing turn is too powerful, I think.
jsnell 3y ago
Congrats on both launching and on the unique game design. This desperately needs a attack result preview, or if that's too hard at least a "you're starting an attack you'll lose" warning of some kind. The combat resolution rules are unintuitive, and I keep sometimes incorrectly predicting the results, and sometimes even not understanding why I lost despite the information in the battle pane. Losing an attack is so crippling that you might as well resign. It doesn't help that the only place to find the rules is scattered about in a tedious tutorial. The tutorial itself can't be fixed; it's the nature of tutorials to suck. But it'd be great to have a help page with the rules accessible somewhere. The rules aren't long, so it doesn't seem incompatible with the aesthetics of the game.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thanks! I can't say I disagree — we hoped to structure the tutorial as a sequence of rules, but the explanations tend to grow. A concise reference would indeed be good. > This desperately needs a attack result preview Not too hard, just waiting for all the feedback to roll in before deciding either way. If we stay sitting on the fence, it might make its way in as a "tutor" mode :)
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Personally, I disagree on adding this, outside a "tutor" mode. Figuring out if I'm blundering (and requiring my opponent to do the same) is a big part of the fun. Without that potential for mistake, I think it would be like chess masters playing themselves to a draw in every game.
    - jsnell 3y ago
      I don't think that's a good analogy. In chess, there's no question of how a move will resolve. You might not be able to predict the future consequences of the move, but every single player will always know without error what the board state will be after the move. That's not the case here; any time you attack, there are two possible end states for the board. It's often not immediately obvious which of the two you'll end up in, but the outcome is deterministic and the process to determine the outcome is mechanical. The optimal way to play the game is to just manually do all these mechanical dictionary lookups and rule checks. That's tedious, not fun. Having a battle preview (and word highlighting as suggested elsewhere) wouldn't actually remove any of the actual skill involved in memorizing a word list, reading upside down, or being able to visualize the outcomes. Having that knowledge is a prerequisite for building a good board. All that these better visualizations achieve is allow people to build that knowledge and those skills organically while playing the game. And "playing the game" is a key part there. In the current state the game is so unergonomic that I predict 99.9% of the players bounce before winning a single game on the easiest difficulty, and never return. Chess can afford to be harsh and unforgiving because it's got hundreds of years of momentum behind it, and a history of being played on a board without any digital quality of life features. New games don't have that benefit. It's probably more instructive to look at other word games. What happens in Scrabble if you use an invalid word? You forfeit a turn. Worldle? Nothing. In this game you'll lose a dozen rounds worth of board development.
newzisforsukas 3y ago
It was more frustrating than fun for me
zuminator 3y ago
I'd like some indication that a word was invalid, say, if the tiles comprising that word were faded, so I wouldn't have to keep looking words up before every other move. Either that, or have a top level button for the dictionary, and when it opens list all the valid words currently in play so you can see at a glance if your opponent's word will be hazardous. I also agree with the other comment that said knowing the outcome of your potential move would be helpful. Maybe even a training mode where every time you're about to self-own, the game displays a question mark and gives you a chance to retract the move. The only other thing is, and I don't know how much it would impact gameplay, but having two-letter words count as valid seems like a cheat somehow because of all the sketchy ones like "oi" and "er." I wish the game could be configured to only accept 3+ letter words. Overall, gameplay was interesting, but as it stands, not addictive.
gcanyon 3y ago
Congrats, this looks awesome and I appreciate the thought and effort that go into defining a working game. That said, some comments: 1. Maybe (definitely maybe, not sure about this) highlight valid and invalid words on the board. It depends on the emphasis. The (scrabble?) dictionary is large and capricious. 2. The rules for battles seem counterintuitive: if you have an invalid word and a winning word, the invalid word loses, but if you have a losing word and a winning word, the winning word wins? And if your opponent has a winning word and a losing or invalid word, their losing/invalid word goes away, but their winning word stays (except any letters touching your placed tile) while if you have an invalid word and a winning word, your whole winning word goes away? 3. What happens in a battle between two invalid words? Again, congrats, and especially on doing this in rust, it must be super-performant :-)
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! On 1. — this is definitely the most common piece of feedback so far, so we'll certainly look into it. On 2. — the battles rules are the most complex part of the game, since they have evolved through the play testing and battle analogies. Our intuition has been that an invalid attacker "sabotages" the battle, and makes the whole attack fail (i.e. an ineffective army rushing a position will often lose in its entirety). And a short-but-valid word is a competent soldier who just isn't strong enough to win on their own :) Possibly something for us to explain more in one of the tutorial/lore/explanation areas. On 3. — defenders aren't even evaluated if the attacker fails, so the attacking invalid word is removed. Thanks again, great feedback :)
jbmny 3y ago
The rules took a while to get used to, but after a couple games I was hooked! You start to get a feel for what works and what doesn't, and it's not quite the same as Scrabble and similar games. Unique and challenging -- great work!
pimlottc 3y ago
UI feedback: There needs to be more animation to make the transition between game states more clear. For example, when you draw a new tile, it could slide in, or glow/sparkle, helping draw your attention to it. When it just appears, it’s not immediately clear which tile just changed. Battles in particular would benefit from animation, highlighting which words are valid/invalid, which particular words are the “strongest” words on each side, and which tiles are truncated in the aftermath. These animations don’t need to be long or elaborate, and advanced players may even want to toggle them off, but they will be very helpful for newer players.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Great suggestions, thanks!
pimlottc 3y ago
Gameplay feedback: it feels like you have to win (or lose) quickly, else the middle board gets cramped and it bogs down to a long slog. Sometimes I dropped junk in protected areas of the game just to wait for my opponent to be forced to touch my “front line”. I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles. Getting a rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to waste turns playing them out knowing they will weaken your board and get destroyed.
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Played for a while and agree with the feedback. Too many vowels, I'm trying to understand why that is compared to Scrabble. I think because the words are formed incrementally vs Scrabble where all tiles are placed at once.
  - slayflayfish 3y ago
    Tuning the vowel to consonant ratio was an important part of optimizing scrabbles appeal to users actually, back in the day
- jameshart 3y ago
  Everyone's take on a game is going to be subjective, but just to counter some of this feedback... For me, these aren't gameplay weaknesses - they're a summary of what makes eking out a win satisfying. > it feels like you have to win (or lose) quickly, else the middle board gets cramped and it bogs down to a long slog. Why is that a bad thing? If games always resulted in a quick win for whoever gets the lucky start/letter draw, where would be the fun? Restricted territory in the middle of the board is what the players have to overcome. > Sometimes I dropped junk in protected areas of the game just to wait for my opponent to be forced to touch my “front line”. That sounds like a sound strategy. It forces you to spend a resource (protected space; potentially useful tiles) in order to take advantage of the defensive advantage, with the potential payoff that it can turn the tide of the game. It also helps build up a reservoir of usable swappable tiles... but using swaps well is also tricky, so it's not pure advantage. Playing these waiting game phases effectively, for me, added to the sense of satisfaction in pulling off a win. > I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles. Getting a rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to waste turns playing them out knowing they will weaken your board and get destroyed. You're not wasting turns, you're getting rid of vowels in order to get to draw new letters. Finding ways to make the sacrifices without weakening your position requires smart play. Again, getting past these obstacles makes for a fun challenge.
throwaway35777 3y ago
Really neat. Would be awesome to have online matchmaking. Would be interesting to play against another random human. I enjoy the gameplay, the mechanic of building up big words to eat through the opponents structure is really cool! I'm a big addict of wordle and quina as well. Word games in general still feel unexplored, I always expect them not to be fun and then get sucked in.
navane 3y ago
Somehow my opponents nonsense words kept beating my nonsense words. Even though they were within 1 length of each other. Can I see a rule summary? I did the tutorial but I don't want to do that again.
mgkimsal 3y ago
No idea how to actually play. "You can only place tiles touching your dock or your existing tiles". When you first play, there's no other tiles to touch. Trying to place a tile next to 'my' dock... shows that error message. There's only one or two places to drop a tile, and it's preventing that. :/ EDIT:.... hrm... so the tutorial always shows 'me' at the bottom'. Apparently, I'm at the top, and my 'dock' is at the top. That's a confusing way to start something. Relying on 'color' of tiles alone is just.. this was aggravating.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thanks for the comment — we'll take another crack at clarifying the starting position :)
  - mgkimsal 3y ago
    Thank you for your patience in taking random comments like mine seriously. :) Interesting game - will be sharing with friends!
wdumaresq 3y ago
It's an interesting game, I think. So far I haven't quite reached the point of satisfying gameplay as I keep getting caught in traps like forgetting that words need to go down, not up (even though I play Scrabble!). I'll try it a few more times. I also created a word-based strategy game (Crossword Island Hopper) with the concepts of capturing territory and battling your opponent. It has these differences: 1) Each turn is one word, and turns are played simultaneously by all players. 2) In a battle the newest word can either be destroyed or letters can be converted to your own. 3) Default mode is to win by points but there are also modes where you need to connect your words from point to point to win, like this game. You can try it here: http://crosswordislandhopper.com/cih http://crosswordislandhopper.com/cih
jameshart 3y ago
Really enjoyable. Disagree with some of the comments here about wanting to be warned if you're about to lose a battle - losing battles can be strategically advantageous to dispose of unwanted letters and free up board space. It's possible to fight back from near defeat - even a total wipeout - and long back-and-forth fights across the board can happen. I definitely don't want to be prevented from sacrificing. Maybe a mode where you can see a preview of how a move will play out before you commit the move would help. I do agree with some of the other comments that the letter probabilities seem a little unbalanced, but that could just be the tendency to remember runs of bad luck in the letter draw. In terms of dictionary feedback: I'd love to see at a glance on the board which words are 'real words' and which are not. Some sort of visual highlighting of the letters that are in a word would be great. Having the dictionary always available would be great, rather than having to click twice to get into it, then click again to focus the lookup field. The AI never seems to use swaps. Is that deliberate?
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! Many good notes, we'll look into a lot of that. And yes currently it's deliberate, but I think we can squeeze some AI swaps in!
quuxplusone 3y ago
Clicking "Resign" brings up a dialog that asks: "Play again? / Resign / Continue playing". Now, obviously the answer to "Play again?" is yes — I don't want to stop playing entirely, I want to "Continue playing". But that's the wrong answer and dumps me back into the game I was trying to resign! The dialog should say either "Really resign? / Resign / No, keep playing" or else "Resign and play again? / Yes / No, keep playing". I, also, find the game pretty hard: the biggest difficulty is that you can't control the letters that come out, so even if you know a word that you'd like to make, you might have to spend 20 turns playing useless letters on the back field while hoping for an "S" or whatever.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
OK I'm going to go ahead and say this is an absolutely phenomenal game. Great, original idea. I could see myself playing this with friends, and it could even be a successful board game, though we'd need a legend explaining the different things that can happen when a battle occurs (namely, if one of the attack words is not valid, the attack outright fails regardless of what's defending) Needs a dictionary also. For the online version (which is gorgeous) it really needs a multiplayer discovery mode. I'm in room code PEEP if anyone fancies a game: https://truncate.town/#PEEP https://truncate.town/#PEEP edit: seems like the board editing in multiplayer mode doesn't work
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Amazing, thanks for the feedback! > edit: seems like the board editing in multiplayer mode doesn't work oops, will get onto fixing that
- cassepipe 3y ago
  There is a dictionary. Just click on the bottom right arrow and click on the dictionary.
ralferoo 3y ago
I enjoyed this and played for a few hours. The biggest problem for me is the dictionary - it seems very biased towards US English, so for instance I lost one game when my base was defended with "soiree" which apparently isn't in the dictionary, another one when I was defending the middle of the board with "knives" and wanted the s elsewhere, so swapped it for a d to make "knived" and immediately lost the next round because only "knifed" is in your dictionary, even though both are correct in British English. There's a whole load of annoying 2 and 3 character words that the computer uses that I've never heard of, but a couple of the more normal ones weren't accepted. A few other people have suggested colouring the words based on whether they're in the dictionary, which may help some of the cases, but doesn't help when you're trying to build up to a word and then discover it's not in your dictionary. I personally disliked the "weakest link" rule, because there were just so many rules, I'd forgotten this one, and fell afoul of it a couple of times, before I went back and checked the rules again. I can see that maybe I'd like it in the future as when the board is fullish, it forces you to weaken your position, but for the longest time in one game I had a long word across the centre of the board, completely trapping the computer in less than half the grid, but it escaped when I made a 2-letter word off that and he immediately destroyed my entire defence with a 4-letter word. So, it might make the game more fun, but intuitively the longest word should be used for defence. In the end stages of the game, the computer often played really stupid choices. Instead of playing a dummy letter somewhere out of the way, it often stuck it on the end of a word next to my tiles, forced a battle and then lost because it wasn't a word. Maybe that's a strategy to clear out bad tiles, but a couple of times it completely destroyed its defences by doing that. On some of the grids, I think it'd be possible to get to the computer's dock and not their town, which I guess should be a win condition as they would then have no valid move. I certainly got it so the computer lost all its tiles, but then didn't want to try that out for fear of messing everything up when I was only 1 square away from the town (and the dock was past it). I'd kind of like an undo button. A couple of times, I misclicked somewhere, and once I'd accidentally clicked on one tile when deciding on a swap, and then decided to do a different swap and it completely trashed my board instead. That and the potential for instant loss of a a good board position and letter choices if you play a word that's not in the dictionary, would make this a useful feature. The letter distribution might be better if it's weighted like the scrabble letters. One game I had multiple Q, Z, J and V, but not a single N the whole game.
ralegh 3y ago
Huge potential, it's annoying in a way that gets me to keep playing but maybe slightly too annoying- I have a couple suggestions that would change the gameplay a lot so feel free to ignore: Attacks that lose when they are exactly 1 letter longer- if winning by 1 was too powerful, these could draw/stalemate, letting you fortify your position and potentially attack a turn later (giving your opponent a chance to fortify their position). It feels a bit cheap to not be able to spell out a word because the opponent blocks with a shorter word. I also find myself trying to plan words but never getting the right letters - maybe you could add a view of the next 3/5 incoming letters to reduce the rng-ness and allow more planning. Again, great job, I look forward to see how it progresses!
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Interesting suggestions, and thanks for the kind words! Definitely things to ponder :)
CmdrKrool 3y ago
Intriguing and fun. I haven't played it enough to confidently suggest changes to the game mechanics, but I think they're strong enough on their own that any/all added UI comfort would be welcome - like others have been saying, a less clunky dictionary (maybe right-click on a word on the board to look it up?), and maybe a preview of whether your attack is going to succeed or not (maybe just on 'easier' levels, since there is an element of not making a 'simple' miscalculation while you overthink a complex board position, like in Chess. Also, think of a game like Puzzle Bobble / Bust-a-Move where the first few levels give you a line showing you exactly where your bubble is going to land).
ncallaway 3y ago
I would love a small visual indicator of which words were valid/invalid on the board. Maybe something as simple as valid words having slightly green letters, and invalid words having slightly red letters. Or a subtle little sparkle effect around letters that are part of a valid word. Especially when I'm having to read my entire opponent's board upside down, I find parsing which words are valid/invalid to be a time-consuming, mildly frustrating, and not super fun aspect of the game. Maybe that takes too much of the challenge out, but I don't find it's a part of the game I feel like I should have to be good at. Other minor feedback: - There's no cursor or focus indicator on the search box in the dictionary. - The dictionary should open auto-focused. If I click "open dictionary" with the mouse, and start typing nothing happens. I have to click on the "search" box before I can type. This is especially annoying given the lack of feedback from the above point on the search box.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback — it's looking like we'll have to find some solution for showing valid words, based on the comments. (Also, will fix the dictionary, thanks!)
  - ncallaway 3y ago
    Since I didn't say in it my comment, I'll say it in the reply: Congratulations on getting this far! Games are a huge amount of work (so much more than it looks like on the surface), so shipping something is always an accomplishment. I definitely had fun for the rounds I played the other day, which is why I bothered with feedback. It's a great little concept, and well-executed. I really appreciated the tutorial (especially the "sample game", that really solidified the concepts for me after the step-by-step tutorial). Great work so far! Excited to see where it ends up! (And one more super minor feedback while I'm here: when I'm playing on keyboard and mouse, I'd love the ability to press a keyboard key to select a letter, then click to play on the board with a mouse. So: "press the keyboard key 'i', then click on an empty but legal space to play", and one of my 'i' tiles goes to that space". As far as I can tell this would be manageable, since it doesn't seem to matter which 'i' tile I play from my hand).
ndgold 3y ago
This is fun. Feels like scrabble meets risk. I dig it.
leke 3y ago
Amazing game. I love games that require strategy, but it's hard to find ones I like that are based on language. Does this support a non-english vocabulary?
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Not at the moment, but it's only a question of finding good dictionaries to expand the language support :)
meristohm 3y ago
I really appreciate you making and sharing your game! I want to try this at home with Scrabble tiles. I'm interested in games easily played with common bits and pieces. While waiting around one day my spouse and I came up with a game (that had already been come up with in the 1970s, according to Wikipedia when I went looking for games played with Scrabble tiles) we call Scramble; all tiles facedown, take turns flipping a tile, anyone can call out a word longer than three tiles that can be formed with the visible letters, including stealing others' words by inserting a letter(s) to form a new word, as read in either direction (no anagramming). Example: EAT could become EATS, TASE, or STARE but not TEAS or STEAK. If a person says an invalid word they have to be silent for one flip. When the facedown letters got fewer and it became clear from multiple attempts and subsequent ties (at least two players saying a valud word) that a certain tile is an s, we made a rule that "one does not simply add an s to the end of a word" and that it needs to be added with another letter, thus avoiding what felt like Ko battles from Go. Additionally, if you want thinkier games, increase the minimum length for new words every time a Q, X, or Z is revealed.
tech_ken 3y ago
Very fun concept but wow maybe I’m just stupid but this is insanely hard. The battle rules are kind of complicated, so it’s really tough for me to predict which configurations of letters are the most durable. Moreover with enough tiles on the board one loss basically wipes me out, so it’s hard to experiment because I just keep getting clobbered immediately. Definitely like the idea and design, but I think overall it needs better balance or something.
taneq 3y ago
I've spent a bunch of time playing this over the last couple of days. Overall I love it and I keep coming back to it. There's one thing I find really frustrating, though - the dictionary is incredibly idiosyncratic, including stacks of 'words' that normally I wouldn't expect to be accepted while still excluding some that I'd think are way more usual in this kind of game. (I'd guess this is where some of the confusion on 'why did my attack fail' comes from?) I basically have to look up every word every time. Could we either have the dictionary visible all the time for easier access, or (better option IMO) add a highlight that shows which adjacent letter groups are in the dictionary? Not sure how this would work on mobile without mouseover, though, it might need a separate 'commit' tap after placing and seeing the results.
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Good ideas! Thanks for the notes :) Yes dictionary is a tough thing to nail down perfectly — to start with we're going to highlight existing words on the board that are invalid, but have a similar line of thinking around the "commit" tap after placing, at least behind some learning setting. There'll be a changelog screen for when things like that make it in :)

188 points by liambigelow 3y ago

liambigelow 3y ago

Forgot to mention — it's fully open source at https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate for anyone who likes poking their digital nose around :)

pcthrowaway 3y ago
Can you include text instructions of how to play the game instead of only having an interactive tutorial? I find the slow scroll speed and interactive nature doesn't work as well for me as being able to scan a document. If I forget a specific point it's frustrating to have to go through the whole tutorial again.
mdaniel 3y ago
Congratulations on the game, and thanks for choosing to share the source! It would help if it had a license file in the repo in order to express what rights you grant to others
- liambigelow 3y ago
  Oh good note thanks, my mistake. It should be MIT, I'll add the license today.
leke 3y ago
I incorrectly guessed this was a JS coded game.

dwighttk 3y ago

It isn’t really my kinda game but it looks like it could be really good

gus_massa 3y ago

Nitpicking: in the "learn to play" tutorial, in the step to add an e in _nough and _ex versus four, the blue tiles are disconected that is an invalid position. Perhaps you can add a tile somewhere in the middle to conect them.

liambigelow 3y ago
aha they totally are, that's more than a nitpick! Will fix, thanks for pointing that out.

akirathedev 3y ago

Congrats on the MVP launch! Love the game, it's awesome!

captn3m0 3y ago

This breaks in lockdown mode on iOS.

liambigelow 3y ago
Darn. I do believe lockdown mode fully disables WebAssembly, so that makes sense. I don't think there are any significant roadblocks to packaging the game as a native app, so that might be a good push to do so.

FrancoisBosun 3y ago

I enjoyed my game. I had some difficulty playing due to the board not being very wide: many nooks and crannies. In the dictionary, search for « ti » and notice the invalid character in « solfage ». Congrats!

liambigelow 3y ago
Thank you! Yes, for the puzzles we would up having to constrain the board to a size that wasn't too egregious when sharing emojis... The classic single player has a bit more room to breathe :) (Thanks for pointing out the font — I do have an issue for that (https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/issues/111 https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/issues/111) so it's nice to get validation on its importance)

yakkomajuri 3y ago

This is super cool. My main feedback at this point is about the dictionary. I'd have it be open on the side so I can see the board and use it at the same time. Or, as a half-step, have a shortcut to open it and have ESC close it. Although personally I'd prefer the former. But congrats on this, it's awesome!

card_zero 3y ago
Maybe putting down a tile should open the dictionary and look up the words formed, instead of the player having to type them in, and then there should be buttons for "make this move" and "make a different move instead".
- yakkomajuri 3y ago
  I think this might take away a bit from the "strategy" of the game. Or not so much strategy but the mental fog that plays a role in blunders and the like - the same as how it's harder to get a grasp on your opponent's words at a glance because they're flipped. Just my 2c
  - card_zero 3y ago
    You think it might make life too easy? But it's similar in some Sid Meier games where you can see the outcome of a battle (or the odds) before committing. Besides which, the dictionary is patchy and unpredictable, so I use it on most moves anyway, to strategize around its arbitrary subset of English.
    - liambigelow 3y ago
      Good notes on both fronts, so thanks! We have been on the fence about this (and still are!). One option is to add this kind of UI in a "tutor" mode that starts on, and can be opt-out at some point. Not sold on it yet, but mulling it over.
      - sanderjd 3y ago

card_zero 3y ago

The dictionary isn't very good. * Doesn't include useful but rare short words, such as el * Does include obscure or slang words such as stere and jones * But doesn't include their conjugations. I lost due to making steres without checking to see if the game knows the plural (it doesn't).

liambigelow 3y ago
Thanks for the examples, I'll note them. We did intentionally scale back from the classic wordgame dictionaries (looking at you, Scrabble) due to an overabundance of archaic words that the NPC can play against you — but it does push us into the unfortunate role of dictionary moderators! I'd like to add a button to the dictionary to report words that should be included. For now, we erred on the side of a smaller dictionary since it's less jarring to add words than remove them :) (stere / steres is especially regrettable, sorry!)
- card_zero 3y ago
  El is just the name of L, yet it's cheaty due to how little use it gets. Obtaining a good word list is hard, I have one saved which is a merging and editing of several freely available ones, including one used in Scrabble competitions and one from some Linux distro, and a few "basic word lists". There will be endless errors like missing plurals and past tenses, as well as the inclusion of things like acronyms that shouldn't be in there at all. And if you prune obscure words but allow the submission of missing words, I guess you'd better keep the list of pruned words around so you can head people off at the pass by pre-filtering their submissions.
  - liambigelow 3y ago
    Our current base list is the intersection of Wordnik's games wordlist and the SCOWL spellchecker — words in both are a definite yes, and SCOWL's capitalization helps us filter out acronyms and proper nouns. We have done some manual massaging beyond that, but not much. Waiting for more feedback like this! You can see the current tranches of dictionary massaging here: https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/tree/main/dict_builder/support_data https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/tree/main/dict_buil...

xpe 3y ago

Rule question: In the tutorial, on the "Combatants" screen: > Only words touching another player's words are involved in a battle. This means you can win battles even though your board contains invalid words. > Try playing playing "TO" against your opponent's "FT". > Even though your board is mostly valid, the only words involved in the battle were "TO" and "FT", so you won and "FT" was removed from the board. This doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that "TO" should only battle the opponent's "F" because the opponent has "TOUR" adjacent to "F". If my interpretation was right, only "F" should have been removed.

liambigelow 3y ago
In battles, weak words compromise all of their letters. "TOUR" would be safe, but the "FT" ruins the "T" by making it part of an invalid word — and an invalid word that loses is removed in its entirety. Thanks for pointing it out! It's something we have had come up before, and the sort of thing we keep iterating the tutorial toward explaining better, so we'll take another crack at it!
- xpe 3y ago
  Thanks for your reply. In your meaning, a 'word' is just a contiguous string of letters in one direction... So in this way a 'word' can be invalid or valid. But (pedantic note) it is a little more specific than that. It includes ALL letters until the edge of the board or space on the board. Right? Do most people consider an invalid word to be a kind of word? I don't think I do, and I think this was the source of my confusion. But I'm not a word-game person per se nor Scrabble expert... this might be obvious to other people.
  - liambigelow 3y ago
    Interesting! This might be our Scrabble bias showing through. Yes, when we say "word" I suppose we're meaning "something that a player has claimed to be a word" by placing contiguous tiles. I'll look at somewhere to clarify language in the tutorial.

Kwpolska 3y ago

I went through the tutorial and it feels like a complicated game. The battle rules feel very complex and hard to remember.

xpe 3y ago
I'm just a new player: yeah, I get that. I personally like the rule set, but it would be nice if they could be neatly summarized. Something around this might be a starting point to summarize the battle rules: to win, a player's attacking letter requires two things. (1) All of the attacker's touching words to be valid; (2) At least one attacking word to be 2 letters longer than one of the defender's valid words. (But I don't this is all of it. It probably needs revision.) Aside: I'm not sure what the _minimum_ level of complexity for the rules _could_ be. I get the impression these rules were chosen to make the game more interesting. Having known some game-creators, it is common for game rules to be play tested. But there is always the question of "play tested for what audience?" P.S. I like the game so far. A lot. I see a lot of potential in it, but yeah, it is significantly more complex than Scrabble.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep, I suspect the "win by 2 letters" thing is a play-tested thing. Simpler would just be "the attacker needs one more letter". But I suspect +2 results in a more fun game, at the cost of being slightly harder to learn the game and reason out the results of each battle. Aside: For instance, +1 is the defender's advantage in Risk, and I always loved the mechanics added by the Lord of the Rings version (and maybe other versions) where you could modify that advantage to anything from +0 (with a "leader" in the attacking army), to +3 (with a leader in a defending army on a tile with a "stronghold"). This is a bit different because it isn't dice rolls, but a similar idea.
mbrain 3y ago
I gave up in the middle of the tutorial.
sanderjd 3y ago
Agreed, but in a good way. Some games are brilliant via simplicity, others are brilliant via more complex but elegantly interlocking rules.

xpe 3y ago

Warning: if you don't know Scrabble words you will be utterly destroyed. For example "REC" is valid: "An abbreviation for recreation". What the f-? HAHA

card_zero 3y ago
The npc just won a battle with the word st, defined as "expressing a sudden desire for silence". Hmm, that's apparently sourced from Wiktionary. Wiktionary is great, but has a very broad concept of "word".
- liambigelow 3y ago
  We source the definitions from Wiktionary, but have a much higher bar for words to count as valid in the game. ST comes up often, as I agree it's one of the iffier words, but even Cambridge claims to to be so: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/st https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/st
  - card_zero 3y ago
    That page only defines it as an abbreviation (for saint, short ton, street, or stone).
    - liambigelow 3y ago
      Ah, 2am reading comprehension on my part. Yes, if we ever remove rather than add to the dictionary in the future I might look to axe it.
      - xpe 3y ago
        Yes, please ax "st".
- xpe 3y ago
  "ST is not a playable word" per https://scrabble.merriam.com https://scrabble.merriam.com

wigster 3y ago

i beat AN with FEN to win - i was expecting to lose due to defender +2 bonus.

liambigelow 3y ago
Oh! Yes, this is an interesting case. Towns actually slot into the battle as one-letter words, so this case FEN is long enough. It doesn't come up much, but it might deserve elaboration in an "advanced" tutorial since it's unexpected.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Or have you considered not having towns work that way? Seems like a confusing caveat to me, unless there is a good reason for it.
  - liambigelow 3y ago
    Yeah that's probably the best solution.

octopusRex 3y ago

Kudos for creating the game. Reading upside down is difficult. In Scrabble you could turn the board around to face you when it was your turn. Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with? I tried to get through the tutorial , but could not. Maybe simplify the rules or simplify the game before I'd play, but others may enjoy. I do play wordle and other NYTimes word games , and scrabble, so I'm not averse to those types of games. Maybe I should have had a cup of coffee first. I will try again later. But still hats off for creating it. Congratulations.

liambigelow 3y ago
Thanks! And thanks for the great feedback — the tutorial is indeed long, but that just means more (fun) iteration to go! > Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with? Much like us, the NPC can be plagued with a simply terrible hand ;) Again, appreciate the notes!
sanderjd 3y ago
Counterpoint: I found the tutorial great for teaching a game that is not super simple, in a good way. I think it would be a mistake to simplify the rules in order to simplify the learning process. I think the rules are elegant, just not straightforward, as is the case for many excellent games. Agreed on the reading-upside-down thing, though I think it's still the right choice. But I suspect it's something anyone playing the game regularly would become adept at very quickly. Maybe just add a quick "rotate board" button / hotkey to use when evaluating the opponent's position. I think my one minor criticism is the "touching the opponent's town" thing. I find that it's not a particularly fun goal. Many such things go with a "war" analogy to add some interest, like an army destroying the opponent's fortress or whatever. If you'd prefer to avoid that (though the "attacking" and "defending" language is already in the game), it could be like you're building a path for a rabbit to get a carrot, or maybe it's water and you're building a bridge to the other side. Or the win state could instead be to eliminate all the opponent's letters. As-is, that would eliminate the fun "racing" mechanic, which would be unfortunate. But perhaps (going back to the bridge idea), the "town" squares could be like bridge supports, and reaching one would knock out anything it is "holding up". So you could still race to knock out the critical "root" support, which would usually win in nearly the same way as currently (but maybe with a few more cleanup moves). Love the game! Hope the ideas are interesting rather than annoying :) Edit to add: Oh! One thing I actually missed in the tutorial (but figured out in the example game) is that words must be valid top-to-bottom or left-to-right. I was confused by the outcome of some battles in my initial games, due to building "valid" words bottom-to-top only to see them defeated by shorter ones. Relatedly, maybe in the "easy" modes, valid words could be highlighted? Then I would have known that when I built "yria" from top-to-bottom, it was not actually the valid word "airy" read from bottom-to-top.

gmargari 3y ago

Really nice game, congrats! Just a small note: I just tried and swapped two identical letters, effectively yielding my turn. Not sure if this allowed by design.

liambigelow 3y ago
Good point, I think we discussed this in the past and it shouldn't be — which we promptly forgot! Will amend. (and thanks!)
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I hadn't thought of doing this! But yeah, I agree with what you concluded previously - passing turn is too powerful, I think.

jsnell 3y ago

Congrats on both launching and on the unique game design. This desperately needs a attack result preview, or if that's too hard at least a "you're starting an attack you'll lose" warning of some kind. The combat resolution rules are unintuitive, and I keep sometimes incorrectly predicting the results, and sometimes even not understanding why I lost despite the information in the battle pane. Losing an attack is so crippling that you might as well resign. It doesn't help that the only place to find the rules is scattered about in a tedious tutorial. The tutorial itself can't be fixed; it's the nature of tutorials to suck. But it'd be great to have a help page with the rules accessible somewhere. The rules aren't long, so it doesn't seem incompatible with the aesthetics of the game.

liambigelow 3y ago
Thanks! I can't say I disagree — we hoped to structure the tutorial as a sequence of rules, but the explanations tend to grow. A concise reference would indeed be good. > This desperately needs a attack result preview Not too hard, just waiting for all the feedback to roll in before deciding either way. If we stay sitting on the fence, it might make its way in as a "tutor" mode :)
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Personally, I disagree on adding this, outside a "tutor" mode. Figuring out if I'm blundering (and requiring my opponent to do the same) is a big part of the fun. Without that potential for mistake, I think it would be like chess masters playing themselves to a draw in every game.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    I don't think that's a good analogy. In chess, there's no question of how a move will resolve. You might not be able to predict the future consequences of the move, but every single player will always know without error what the board state will be after the move. That's not the case here; any time you attack, there are two possible end states for the board. It's often not immediately obvious which of the two you'll end up in, but the outcome is deterministic and the process to determine the outcome is mechanical. The optimal way to play the game is to just manually do all these mechanical dictionary lookups and rule checks. That's tedious, not fun. Having a battle preview (and word highlighting as suggested elsewhere) wouldn't actually remove any of the actual skill involved in memorizing a word list, reading upside down, or being able to visualize the outcomes. Having that knowledge is a prerequisite for building a good board. All that these better visualizations achieve is allow people to build that knowledge and those skills organically while playing the game. And "playing the game" is a key part there. In the current state the game is so unergonomic that I predict 99.9% of the players bounce before winning a single game on the easiest difficulty, and never return. Chess can afford to be harsh and unforgiving because it's got hundreds of years of momentum behind it, and a history of being played on a board without any digital quality of life features. New games don't have that benefit. It's probably more instructive to look at other word games. What happens in Scrabble if you use an invalid word? You forfeit a turn. Worldle? Nothing. In this game you'll lose a dozen rounds worth of board development.

newzisforsukas 3y ago

It was more frustrating than fun for me

zuminator 3y ago

I'd like some indication that a word was invalid, say, if the tiles comprising that word were faded, so I wouldn't have to keep looking words up before every other move. Either that, or have a top level button for the dictionary, and when it opens list all the valid words currently in play so you can see at a glance if your opponent's word will be hazardous. I also agree with the other comment that said knowing the outcome of your potential move would be helpful. Maybe even a training mode where every time you're about to self-own, the game displays a question mark and gives you a chance to retract the move. The only other thing is, and I don't know how much it would impact gameplay, but having two-letter words count as valid seems like a cheat somehow because of all the sketchy ones like "oi" and "er." I wish the game could be configured to only accept 3+ letter words. Overall, gameplay was interesting, but as it stands, not addictive.

gcanyon 3y ago

Congrats, this looks awesome and I appreciate the thought and effort that go into defining a working game. That said, some comments: 1. Maybe (definitely maybe, not sure about this) highlight valid and invalid words on the board. It depends on the emphasis. The (scrabble?) dictionary is large and capricious. 2. The rules for battles seem counterintuitive: if you have an invalid word and a winning word, the invalid word loses, but if you have a losing word and a winning word, the winning word wins? And if your opponent has a winning word and a losing or invalid word, their losing/invalid word goes away, but their winning word stays (except any letters touching your placed tile) while if you have an invalid word and a winning word, your whole winning word goes away? 3. What happens in a battle between two invalid words? Again, congrats, and especially on doing this in rust, it must be super-performant :-)

liambigelow 3y ago
Thanks for the kind words! On 1. — this is definitely the most common piece of feedback so far, so we'll certainly look into it. On 2. — the battles rules are the most complex part of the game, since they have evolved through the play testing and battle analogies. Our intuition has been that an invalid attacker "sabotages" the battle, and makes the whole attack fail (i.e. an ineffective army rushing a position will often lose in its entirety). And a short-but-valid word is a competent soldier who just isn't strong enough to win on their own :) Possibly something for us to explain more in one of the tutorial/lore/explanation areas. On 3. — defenders aren't even evaluated if the attacker fails, so the attacking invalid word is removed. Thanks again, great feedback :)

jbmny 3y ago

The rules took a while to get used to, but after a couple games I was hooked! You start to get a feel for what works and what doesn't, and it's not quite the same as Scrabble and similar games. Unique and challenging -- great work!

pimlottc 3y ago

UI feedback: There needs to be more animation to make the transition between game states more clear. For example, when you draw a new tile, it could slide in, or glow/sparkle, helping draw your attention to it. When it just appears, it’s not immediately clear which tile just changed. Battles in particular would benefit from animation, highlighting which words are valid/invalid, which particular words are the “strongest” words on each side, and which tiles are truncated in the aftermath. These animations don’t need to be long or elaborate, and advanced players may even want to toggle them off, but they will be very helpful for newer players.

liambigelow 3y ago
Great suggestions, thanks!

pimlottc 3y ago

Gameplay feedback: it feels like you have to win (or lose) quickly, else the middle board gets cramped and it bogs down to a long slog. Sometimes I dropped junk in protected areas of the game just to wait for my opponent to be forced to touch my “front line”. I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles. Getting a rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to waste turns playing them out knowing they will weaken your board and get destroyed.

nathancahill 3y ago
Played for a while and agree with the feedback. Too many vowels, I'm trying to understand why that is compared to Scrabble. I think because the words are formed incrementally vs Scrabble where all tiles are placed at once.
- slayflayfish 3y ago
  Tuning the vowel to consonant ratio was an important part of optimizing scrabbles appeal to users actually, back in the day
jameshart 3y ago
Everyone's take on a game is going to be subjective, but just to counter some of this feedback... For me, these aren't gameplay weaknesses - they're a summary of what makes eking out a win satisfying. > it feels like you have to win (or lose) quickly, else the middle board gets cramped and it bogs down to a long slog. Why is that a bad thing? If games always resulted in a quick win for whoever gets the lucky start/letter draw, where would be the fun? Restricted territory in the middle of the board is what the players have to overcome. > Sometimes I dropped junk in protected areas of the game just to wait for my opponent to be forced to touch my “front line”. That sounds like a sound strategy. It forces you to spend a resource (protected space; potentially useful tiles) in order to take advantage of the defensive advantage, with the potential payoff that it can turn the tide of the game. It also helps build up a reservoir of usable swappable tiles... but using swaps well is also tricky, so it's not pure advantage. Playing these waiting game phases effectively, for me, added to the sense of satisfaction in pulling off a win. > I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles. Getting a rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to waste turns playing them out knowing they will weaken your board and get destroyed. You're not wasting turns, you're getting rid of vowels in order to get to draw new letters. Finding ways to make the sacrifices without weakening your position requires smart play. Again, getting past these obstacles makes for a fun challenge.

throwaway35777 3y ago

Really neat. Would be awesome to have online matchmaking. Would be interesting to play against another random human. I enjoy the gameplay, the mechanic of building up big words to eat through the opponents structure is really cool! I'm a big addict of wordle and quina as well. Word games in general still feel unexplored, I always expect them not to be fun and then get sucked in.

navane 3y ago

Somehow my opponents nonsense words kept beating my nonsense words. Even though they were within 1 length of each other. Can I see a rule summary? I did the tutorial but I don't want to do that again.

mgkimsal 3y ago

No idea how to actually play. "You can only place tiles touching your dock or your existing tiles". When you first play, there's no other tiles to touch. Trying to place a tile next to 'my' dock... shows that error message. There's only one or two places to drop a tile, and it's preventing that. :/ EDIT:.... hrm... so the tutorial always shows 'me' at the bottom'. Apparently, I'm at the top, and my 'dock' is at the top. That's a confusing way to start something. Relying on 'color' of tiles alone is just.. this was aggravating.

liambigelow 3y ago
Thanks for the comment — we'll take another crack at clarifying the starting position :)
- mgkimsal 3y ago
  Thank you for your patience in taking random comments like mine seriously. :) Interesting game - will be sharing with friends!

wdumaresq 3y ago

It's an interesting game, I think. So far I haven't quite reached the point of satisfying gameplay as I keep getting caught in traps like forgetting that words need to go down, not up (even though I play Scrabble!). I'll try it a few more times. I also created a word-based strategy game (Crossword Island Hopper) with the concepts of capturing territory and battling your opponent. It has these differences: 1) Each turn is one word, and turns are played simultaneously by all players. 2) In a battle the newest word can either be destroyed or letters can be converted to your own. 3) Default mode is to win by points but there are also modes where you need to connect your words from point to point to win, like this game. You can try it here: http://crosswordislandhopper.com/cih http://crosswordislandhopper.com/cih

jameshart 3y ago

Really enjoyable. Disagree with some of the comments here about wanting to be warned if you're about to lose a battle - losing battles can be strategically advantageous to dispose of unwanted letters and free up board space. It's possible to fight back from near defeat - even a total wipeout - and long back-and-forth fights across the board can happen. I definitely don't want to be prevented from sacrificing. Maybe a mode where you can see a preview of how a move will play out before you commit the move would help. I do agree with some of the other comments that the letter probabilities seem a little unbalanced, but that could just be the tendency to remember runs of bad luck in the letter draw. In terms of dictionary feedback: I'd love to see at a glance on the board which words are 'real words' and which are not. Some sort of visual highlighting of the letters that are in a word would be great. Having the dictionary always available would be great, rather than having to click twice to get into it, then click again to focus the lookup field. The AI never seems to use swaps. Is that deliberate?

liambigelow 3y ago
Thanks for the kind words! Many good notes, we'll look into a lot of that. And yes currently it's deliberate, but I think we can squeeze some AI swaps in!

quuxplusone 3y ago

Clicking "Resign" brings up a dialog that asks: "Play again? / Resign / Continue playing". Now, obviously the answer to "Play again?" is yes — I don't want to stop playing entirely, I want to "Continue playing". But that's the wrong answer and dumps me back into the game I was trying to resign! The dialog should say either "Really resign? / Resign / No, keep playing" or else "Resign and play again? / Yes / No, keep playing". I, also, find the game pretty hard: the biggest difficulty is that you can't control the letters that come out, so even if you know a word that you'd like to make, you might have to spend 20 turns playing useless letters on the back field while hoping for an "S" or whatever.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

OK I'm going to go ahead and say this is an absolutely phenomenal game. Great, original idea. I could see myself playing this with friends, and it could even be a successful board game, though we'd need a legend explaining the different things that can happen when a battle occurs (namely, if one of the attack words is not valid, the attack outright fails regardless of what's defending) Needs a dictionary also. For the online version (which is gorgeous) it really needs a multiplayer discovery mode. I'm in room code PEEP if anyone fancies a game: https://truncate.town/#PEEP https://truncate.town/#PEEP edit: seems like the board editing in multiplayer mode doesn't work

liambigelow 3y ago
Amazing, thanks for the feedback! > edit: seems like the board editing in multiplayer mode doesn't work oops, will get onto fixing that
cassepipe 3y ago
There is a dictionary. Just click on the bottom right arrow and click on the dictionary.

ralferoo 3y ago

I enjoyed this and played for a few hours. The biggest problem for me is the dictionary - it seems very biased towards US English, so for instance I lost one game when my base was defended with "soiree" which apparently isn't in the dictionary, another one when I was defending the middle of the board with "knives" and wanted the s elsewhere, so swapped it for a d to make "knived" and immediately lost the next round because only "knifed" is in your dictionary, even though both are correct in British English. There's a whole load of annoying 2 and 3 character words that the computer uses that I've never heard of, but a couple of the more normal ones weren't accepted. A few other people have suggested colouring the words based on whether they're in the dictionary, which may help some of the cases, but doesn't help when you're trying to build up to a word and then discover it's not in your dictionary. I personally disliked the "weakest link" rule, because there were just so many rules, I'd forgotten this one, and fell afoul of it a couple of times, before I went back and checked the rules again. I can see that maybe I'd like it in the future as when the board is fullish, it forces you to weaken your position, but for the longest time in one game I had a long word across the centre of the board, completely trapping the computer in less than half the grid, but it escaped when I made a 2-letter word off that and he immediately destroyed my entire defence with a 4-letter word. So, it might make the game more fun, but intuitively the longest word should be used for defence. In the end stages of the game, the computer often played really stupid choices. Instead of playing a dummy letter somewhere out of the way, it often stuck it on the end of a word next to my tiles, forced a battle and then lost because it wasn't a word. Maybe that's a strategy to clear out bad tiles, but a couple of times it completely destroyed its defences by doing that. On some of the grids, I think it'd be possible to get to the computer's dock and not their town, which I guess should be a win condition as they would then have no valid move. I certainly got it so the computer lost all its tiles, but then didn't want to try that out for fear of messing everything up when I was only 1 square away from the town (and the dock was past it). I'd kind of like an undo button. A couple of times, I misclicked somewhere, and once I'd accidentally clicked on one tile when deciding on a swap, and then decided to do a different swap and it completely trashed my board instead. That and the potential for instant loss of a a good board position and letter choices if you play a word that's not in the dictionary, would make this a useful feature. The letter distribution might be better if it's weighted like the scrabble letters. One game I had multiple Q, Z, J and V, but not a single N the whole game.

ralegh 3y ago

Huge potential, it's annoying in a way that gets me to keep playing but maybe slightly too annoying- I have a couple suggestions that would change the gameplay a lot so feel free to ignore: Attacks that lose when they are exactly 1 letter longer- if winning by 1 was too powerful, these could draw/stalemate, letting you fortify your position and potentially attack a turn later (giving your opponent a chance to fortify their position). It feels a bit cheap to not be able to spell out a word because the opponent blocks with a shorter word. I also find myself trying to plan words but never getting the right letters - maybe you could add a view of the next 3/5 incoming letters to reduce the rng-ness and allow more planning. Again, great job, I look forward to see how it progresses!

liambigelow 3y ago
Interesting suggestions, and thanks for the kind words! Definitely things to ponder :)

CmdrKrool 3y ago

Intriguing and fun. I haven't played it enough to confidently suggest changes to the game mechanics, but I think they're strong enough on their own that any/all added UI comfort would be welcome - like others have been saying, a less clunky dictionary (maybe right-click on a word on the board to look it up?), and maybe a preview of whether your attack is going to succeed or not (maybe just on 'easier' levels, since there is an element of not making a 'simple' miscalculation while you overthink a complex board position, like in Chess. Also, think of a game like Puzzle Bobble / Bust-a-Move where the first few levels give you a line showing you exactly where your bubble is going to land).

ncallaway 3y ago

I would love a small visual indicator of which words were valid/invalid on the board. Maybe something as simple as valid words having slightly green letters, and invalid words having slightly red letters. Or a subtle little sparkle effect around letters that are part of a valid word. Especially when I'm having to read my entire opponent's board upside down, I find parsing which words are valid/invalid to be a time-consuming, mildly frustrating, and not super fun aspect of the game. Maybe that takes too much of the challenge out, but I don't find it's a part of the game I feel like I should have to be good at. Other minor feedback: - There's no cursor or focus indicator on the search box in the dictionary. - The dictionary should open auto-focused. If I click "open dictionary" with the mouse, and start typing nothing happens. I have to click on the "search" box before I can type. This is especially annoying given the lack of feedback from the above point on the search box.

liambigelow 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback — it's looking like we'll have to find some solution for showing valid words, based on the comments. (Also, will fix the dictionary, thanks!)
- ncallaway 3y ago
  Since I didn't say in it my comment, I'll say it in the reply: Congratulations on getting this far! Games are a huge amount of work (so much more than it looks like on the surface), so shipping something is always an accomplishment. I definitely had fun for the rounds I played the other day, which is why I bothered with feedback. It's a great little concept, and well-executed. I really appreciated the tutorial (especially the "sample game", that really solidified the concepts for me after the step-by-step tutorial). Great work so far! Excited to see where it ends up! (And one more super minor feedback while I'm here: when I'm playing on keyboard and mouse, I'd love the ability to press a keyboard key to select a letter, then click to play on the board with a mouse. So: "press the keyboard key 'i', then click on an empty but legal space to play", and one of my 'i' tiles goes to that space". As far as I can tell this would be manageable, since it doesn't seem to matter which 'i' tile I play from my hand).

ndgold 3y ago

This is fun. Feels like scrabble meets risk. I dig it.

leke 3y ago

Amazing game. I love games that require strategy, but it's hard to find ones I like that are based on language. Does this support a non-english vocabulary?

liambigelow 3y ago
Not at the moment, but it's only a question of finding good dictionaries to expand the language support :)

meristohm 3y ago

I really appreciate you making and sharing your game! I want to try this at home with Scrabble tiles. I'm interested in games easily played with common bits and pieces. While waiting around one day my spouse and I came up with a game (that had already been come up with in the 1970s, according to Wikipedia when I went looking for games played with Scrabble tiles) we call Scramble; all tiles facedown, take turns flipping a tile, anyone can call out a word longer than three tiles that can be formed with the visible letters, including stealing others' words by inserting a letter(s) to form a new word, as read in either direction (no anagramming). Example: EAT could become EATS, TASE, or STARE but not TEAS or STEAK. If a person says an invalid word they have to be silent for one flip. When the facedown letters got fewer and it became clear from multiple attempts and subsequent ties (at least two players saying a valud word) that a certain tile is an s, we made a rule that "one does not simply add an s to the end of a word" and that it needs to be added with another letter, thus avoiding what felt like Ko battles from Go. Additionally, if you want thinkier games, increase the minimum length for new words every time a Q, X, or Z is revealed.

tech_ken 3y ago

Very fun concept but wow maybe I’m just stupid but this is insanely hard. The battle rules are kind of complicated, so it’s really tough for me to predict which configurations of letters are the most durable. Moreover with enough tiles on the board one loss basically wipes me out, so it’s hard to experiment because I just keep getting clobbered immediately. Definitely like the idea and design, but I think overall it needs better balance or something.

taneq 3y ago

I've spent a bunch of time playing this over the last couple of days. Overall I love it and I keep coming back to it. There's one thing I find really frustrating, though - the dictionary is incredibly idiosyncratic, including stacks of 'words' that normally I wouldn't expect to be accepted while still excluding some that I'd think are way more usual in this kind of game. (I'd guess this is where some of the confusion on 'why did my attack fail' comes from?) I basically have to look up every word every time. Could we either have the dictionary visible all the time for easier access, or (better option IMO) add a highlight that shows which adjacent letter groups are in the dictionary? Not sure how this would work on mobile without mouseover, though, it might need a separate 'commit' tap after placing and seeing the results.

liambigelow 3y ago
Good ideas! Thanks for the notes :) Yes dictionary is a tough thing to nail down perfectly — to start with we're going to highlight existing words on the board that are invalid, but have a similar line of thinking around the "commit" tap after placing, at least behind some learning setting. There'll be a changelog screen for when things like that make it in :)