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.
There is also the age-old argument about British-English vs American English e.g. Armor is not spelled that way in British English so it takes a lot more effort to work these out.
Pretty slick though.
I’d also enjoy some form of global leaderboard of some sort (maybe a scatterplot comparing time and accuracy?), so I can assess how inferior/superior I am to others.
- there's a timer
- solutions are not always unique
Often in Wordle, you'll have three or four green letters, which leaves several possible answers, and you just have to guess which one is correct. Some days you'll be lucky, some days you won't! But it feels OK because you're not working against a clock; so you have time to mull over the possibilities and decide which one feels better.
In Three Magic words, because you're racing against the clock, once you see a solution you immediately want to put it in. But sometimes it gets rejected! For example, on Tuesday's puzzle:
Gur pbeerpg fbyhgvba jnf CRRYF naq OHYXL, ohg V gevrq CRRXF naq OHYYL juvpu V guvax jbhyq nyfb unir orra inyvq.
Somehow that feels more unfair than the Wordle case. I wonder if it might be better just to accept any valid solution that uses known common words?
I think that solution lock you experience - it's a little uncomfortable, but once you learn to wriggle your way out of it, you get that "aha" feeling I'm going for.
If you just show the number of stars the player got at the end without emphasizing what they missed, those who are playing for speed are rewarded with more stars, those who are playing for low guesses are rewarded for a low number.
If you really want something to formulate a score, count the number of guesses.
- - G G Y
- E E - S
- - - - Y
O P U
B F K L L
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
I haven't done the math, but I suspect there are plenty of solutions like this, you'll just have to calculate them.
Given the restriction that you can only guess "words", you need to improve the wordlist anyway. I had "denty" rejected as a guess, which was not a good look when "folky" turned out to be an official answer.
My other suggestion would be to revise the keyboard input - it's much easier to type the entire word I want to guess than to look at which letters are missing and only type those.
And while it's not a suggestion, I would note that your "cruelly challenging" difficulty level is noticeably easier than the levels that are supposed to be below it, because it provides no clues. This makes it much easier to determine which letters go in which word.
Did you discard "PEEKS" on the same basis?
in this case that puzzle had more solutions because it rejected keeps and bully as well
Why is it a GOOD thing I've never heard of it? I was actually kind of embarrassed about it, and simply expressed my feeling of being detached in a way that I typically don't feel.
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. ;)
The equivalent would be if Worldle made you also guess each intermediate word to get to the solution.
I feel like you should either 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.
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.
Mobile chrome on Google pixel 3.
If it helps, I'm using Chrome on OnePlus Nord.
Too much animation overall
(It's beyond my comprehension why is that so.)
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.
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.
Overall a nice iteration on the Scrabble/Boggle/Wordle paradigm.
I like Three Magic Words's gameplay, but yeah, the presentation left a very sour taste in my mouth. I just want to solve a puzzle and that's it. No need for superfluous animation or scoring.
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 trouble finding the game satisfying without some goal beyond just solving it. However, speed is not required unless you care — you can win without collecting the stars. Perhaps it would be enough to have a well-worded checkbox on the play page ("Chill mode," "don't pressure me", "I'll take my time", something).
> Three Magic Words Wednesday/Week 5: ***** in 03:43/21 guesses
- 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
- I just ignored the timer. Making it optional is a great idea
- I don't have any problem with multiple possible solutions. That's just part of the game.
- 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?
I would play the weekend level again. Dunno if I will be remembering to come back once a week, though.
So far I like the word list you've used. But I've only tried the easier days :p.
* edit: just saw that oceliker ran into the same issue.
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 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.
The animations are very satisfying and the game is very fun.
Fantastic work!
edit: This is on OxygenOS 11.1.2.2 and FireFox 96.3.1
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.
The game script is around 300k. I used Phaser [0] — I originally wrote the game in Swift for iOS and utilized one of that platform’s gaming frameworks(SpriteKit). I rewrote it in TypeScript for the web and wanted a similar framework to ease the porting.
I could be in the wrong here, haven't played it much yet! Congrats on showing it off, very cool.
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.
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 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.
But yeah, I'll play this again for sure.
Does a Flappy Wordle, 2048 Wordle or Flappy 2048 Wordle exist?
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 realize this is common in games, but don't let anyone tell you any different: this is shit code.
