Here’s a free, fun, novel five-letter word game for the web! It’s a game I originally wrote for the iPhone in 2010, but wasn’t able to finish before my first child was born. When I left my senior web developer job in September 2021 I figured I would postpone looking for work and finish the game before another 11 years passed, and expose myself to new skills doing it (in this case, Swift). I released it on the App Store in December, then turned my attention to doing a web version — when suddenly Wordle was in The NY Times, and then everywhere.<p>Perhaps foolishly, I plowed ahead and here we are. Like Wordle and some other NY Times word games, there is a single daily puzzle, but like traditional crossword puzzles, it gets harder throughout the week.
Game Play: maybe you want it this way, but the animations are an impediment to gameplay. I like to type the words, and in a timed situation, typing quickly should be an asset to the player. The animations make good players worse, even on first guesses before you slow the animations. I like slowing the player after multiple bad guesses, but don't hamstring us from the start.<p>Word Lists: far too many plurals. Especially in the games you rate as more challenging, plurals render the game dull. There are plenty of interesting and difficult 5-letter patterns in English that make this type of game better.<p>Stars: this seems like an afterthought. I had done four or five of these puzzles before I realized what the mechanism for the stars was. Even when the summary screen showed that I finished with x number of stars, I really only cared about how quickly I was able to complete the puzzle. It is good that time is the overall measure in your game, but I found that I cared very little about stars in the end.<p>Overall a nice iteration on the Scrabble/Boggle/Wordle paradigm.
This isn't a logic game, this is a game of "guess what word I'm thinking of".<p><pre><code> - - G G Y
- E E - S
- - - - Y
O P U
B F K L L
</code></pre>
Possible solutions:<p><pre><code> b u G G Y
p E E k S
f o l l Y
f o G G Y
p E E k S
b u l l Y
f o G G Y
p E E l S
b u l k Y
</code></pre>
I wrote down the solutions ahead of typing them in, in this order, and was extremely frustrated that the answers I came up with, which were correct, did not read your mind. Even more frustrating because when coming up with the solutions I discarded "PEELS" because it's just a four-letter-word with an S at the end, not a proper five-letter-word. It shouldn't have been a solution.
I know that you're not copying the wordle vibe necessarily, but the animations seem too over the top to me. They're pushing into candy crush territory, and to me that a strong detractor. One of the thing I appreciate about wordle is that it isn't trying to be more than it is, and this feels too much like the free games that fill app stores and employs a bunch of dark patterns to hook your attention.
The game seems to expect a particular solution even when there are multiple possibilities of forming correct words. For example, I tried "peeks" & "bully" but the game only accepted "peels" & "bulky". This is frustrating, as one has to "mind-read" the game.<p>Another thing to improve is to reduce the frequency of plural forms. Plurals are just a cop-out to turn four-letter words into five-letter words. ;)
I really like the execution on this. One piece of feedback is that the timer gave me anxiety and I closed it. I do puzzles to phase out from stress not to challenge myself in a time bound environment
Well executed unique approach, great job! I’ve worked in games my whole life, and that’s hard to do!<p>Like others, I personally don’t like the time pressure and have really enjoyed the async one a day whenever format of wordle. It largely depends on your target audience and objectives for whether it’s right for this game. Separate zen/challenge modes would help players self select, but also muddies the onboarding. Great job though, fun game!
I had only two letters left, K and L. Words: BUL_Y and PEE_S. Each letter works fine in either spot, but only one way was correct. That kind of annoyed me because I guessed wrong the first time.
Nice execution, a variation of Wordle but different enough so as to not be taken as a clone :-)
Quick feedback, why does the round timer inside the yellow star starts decreasing while the letters are still falling/appearing? Shouldn't it start the countdown once all letters and the palying field is ready?
I enjoyed this but I think it could use some refinement.<p>I feel like you should <i>either</i> remove the timer, or accept any correct three words. Being punished for coming up with three words that fit, but aren't the three words you expected, is kind of frustrating.<p>To be honest I find the fact that it evaluates one word at a time to be pretty jarring. I want to be able to try letters in spots without the game yelling at me that they're wrong before I've committed to them. Instead I basically need to replicate the game board down below in the negative space.
Very well done. I almost love it, but the timed nature bothers me, as does the existence of multiple wrong board solves. With this game, I don't want to type in guesses without solving the whole board first, I like the logic puzzle, but if I solve the whole board first and it's wrong, that's too big a chunk of work to throw out for maybe one green or yellow square.<p>I could be in the wrong here, haven't played it much yet! Congrats on showing it off, very cool.
I liked the game and have never played Wordle, so can't really compare. However, I was stuck on one specific set of words for a long time due to spelling issues. The word I couldn't grok was "armor", whereas my brain would by default only recognise "armour". It'd be a nice small enhancement to state clearly what dictionary was being used for the spellings.
Very nice! It's a fun game, and looks really nicely implemented.<p>Congratulations especially on finding the energy to push through and finish this. It must have been a bit disheartening to see Wordle's massive success, and it could have been an easy excuse not to bother finishing your own game (or at least to radically re-think and simplify it into yet another me-too Wordle clone).
I like it! But my one criticism is that it wastes too much time on animation, especially when transitioning from one round to the next. I'm anxious to get started, but have to wait at least 5 seconds for the current puzzle to dissolve, and then all the tiles for the next round to move into place one by one.
Mine loads, but the keyboard never appears to guess letters. I have no idea if there is a bug or if I am doing it wrong.<p>Mobile chrome on Google pixel 3.
Bug: if you click the next letter while the 'victory' animation for the previous letter is still playing, it replaces the previous correct letter with the new one you clicked, instead of putting the second letter in the next empty space<p>Too much animation overall
Nice game and execution!<p>Can't thank you enough for letting me arrange the letters before I use them for a solution. No idea how others feel here, but for that's the difference between "this is fun" and "this is so incredibly hard I will stop at the first puzzle". One can argue that this is a different kind of difficulty level, keeping your 'used' letters in your head.<p>One small nitpick: Sometimes I was doubleclicking a (correct) letter and it was moving towards the red dot, but just before it locked in, it came back and I had to drag it there. I was playing this on a very slow machine though.
I like this a lot. I sort of agree with other posters about the animations, though it looks really good so perhaps some middle ground is possible here. Timer is stressful, but that's fine IMHO - it's a different vibe to Wordle (which let's be honest is waaay too easy) and allows you to compete on a more granular level.<p>I don't so much mind the multiple solutions - if you get the 'wrong' one, that's a new datapoint and you need to guess again, hangman style - but I don't like that it counts as a wrong guess in your stats.<p>But yeah, I'll play this again for sure.
Echoing some thoughts here:<p>- The animations definitely detract for me. It feels like it's about to start showing pop up ads or videos that I have to watch for 30 seconds before continuing<p>- I just ignored the timer. Making it optional is a great idea<p>- I don't have any problem with multiple possible solutions. That's just part of the game.<p>- Would I play again? TBH, probably not. The "fill in the blanks" dynamic just doesn't feel very challenging. Maybe hard mode would be better, but as I understand it I have to wait for later in the week for that, and then presumably on Monday it will cycle back to easy?
This is cool, but there's a bug when there's multiple possible correct solutions
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/S56AWWj.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/S56AWWj.png</a>
You cannot start the game using keyboard. Its nice that game itself supports it, just make that <div class="[...] play-pane […]"> a <button>, pretty please.
I honestly thought you had copied wordle. Well done on powering through. Finishing a project like this is an accomplishment in itself and the fact it is polished adds to it.
Playing on latest Firefox, Windows 10. Was doing the easiest one, and at 1:14 in the fifth round after I typed in the letters for the third row, it just froze up. Didn't say I won or ran out of time. Not sure if that's how it ends or it bugged out.<p>I personally prefer games without time pressure, and I kept trying to type the whole word, not just the missing letters. But it's still a neat idea and an overall great execution.
Nice game. I liked the feel of moving the tiles. There is a slight problem when I first enter a new puzzle. The movable tiles are below the screen! [0]
(On Android, standard Chrome browser). It fixes itself if I rotate to landscape and then back to portrait.<p>So far I like the word list you've used. But I've only tried the easier days :p.<p>[0]: <a href="https://ibb.co/7NvPTnM" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/7NvPTnM</a>
Works absolutely flawlessly on mobile for me (Android Firefox).<p>The animations are very satisfying and the game is very fun.<p>Fantastic work!<p>edit: This is on OxygenOS 11.1.2.2 and FireFox 96.3.1
Looks like the game can get itself into invalid states: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/3Wktj10" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/3Wktj10</a>. Don't want to spoil this board, but there are incorrect letters accepted as green here.<p>* edit: just saw that oceliker ran into the same issue.
Slightly off-topic: when Flappy Bird was cool, games popped up everywhere that were derivatives of Flappy Bird. When 2048 took the scene, a flurry of 2048-like games appeared. Flappy 2048 games also exist.<p>Does a Flappy Wordle, 2048 Wordle or Flappy 2048 Wordle exist?
Curious, why was this implemented as a native app? From what I see, this could have been implemented as a webapp as well. This would have enabled a greater reach, and the possibility to embed this inside different websites.
I've never felt more disconnected from pop culture than now. The quantity of posts that just ASSUMED people knew what the hell Wordle was helped me realize that I do, indeed, live under a rock.
Is this a bug or am I missing something here? Looks like I'm out of vowels...<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/D57IgjE" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/D57IgjE</a>
Cool, fun, inventive, challenging. Might enjoy it even more than Wordle.<p>It took a second for it to load on my mac -- I thought maybe it was busted. Maybe page load speed is something to look into.
I've been enjoying this one too -- <a href="https://nytimes-spellingbee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://nytimes-spellingbee.com/</a>
i appreciate the challenge this offers compared to wordle.<p>NYT's spelling bee has a feature that i think you should consider implementing: a button and/or key press (e.g. space) that shuffles the remaining, unused letters.
It uses massive amounts of CPU even when idle.<p>I realize this is common in games, but don't let anyone tell you any different: this is shit code.