Contexto: Find the Secret Word (opens in new tab)

The "bar" visualization is also nicer to track how close/far you are.

Initially, I got some traction on the site and even some strangers started promoting it.

But I soon realized that there is very little marketing spend reward. The customers spend no money and ad revenue per user is abysmal. This means you can't use conventional channels and have to rely on people actually finding it fun and recommending it to others.

Although it was getting recurring traffic with zero promotion, it still couldn't reach a self sustaining level and I had to shut it down.

You can see Youtube video of it here: https://youtu.be/uLoMd0TkGKk

The point is: Getting the right puzzle formula is extremely hard and every puzzle will not grow like "Wordle".

The basic idea is sound, but it's painful to both start and end a game, and winning isn't very satisfying.

One of wordle's biggest flaws is "the opening". If you're going to have a daily puzzle, it shouldn't be exactly the same board to start every day. Games are so fast that this idea doesn't totally work there, but I think it would be better if they gave you a starting word every day.

The same rule applies here, I think. Your opening move set is basically fixed, and no one is really interested in learning the theory of that. Make the opening less tedious by starting with a couple of random words already played. This has two added benefits. The simplest is that it serves as a tutorial, in all likelihood, if you gave a list of prechosen words and their scores, and a textbox, people would already completely understand the rules of the game without any explanation at all. This is very valuable to a game like this, as it lowers friction.

The second benefit is more specific to this game, but it gives players a lot of hypotheses to test new words against from the outset. You want to reward play that deduces the next word not only from similarity to chosen close words, but also dissimilarity from chosen far words. In order to do that though, you have to choose a pretty large disparate set of far words. This hurts your score and is not particularly dependent on the days puzzle (ie you should pick about the same set every time). The game should probably do this for you, at the beginning.

Finally, you should reveal how many letters are in the target word. I don't want to just probe the model with synonyms. That's extremely tedious. give me enough information to make a plausible guess.

You could even consider a variant of the game where you're only allowed to guess words with the target number of letters, which might actually be mroe fun.

In redactle winning by pure luck still happens, but at least in hindsight you can tell where you went astray, in contexto the answer often turns out to be "because you aren't a high dimensional word embedding trained by Open AI".

another word with a meaning close to the previous one -> this word doesn't count

OK, thanks for making this but I don't why I can't say the_word_which_shall_not_be_named - it is a perfectly valid word after all even if some feel offended by the mere mentioning of it.

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Pure luck.

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