It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword.
It’s free, web based, and responsive.
I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features.
I just launched a ”community puzzle” feature to let players help build new puzzles.
I’d love to know what you think!
I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.
This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.
I’m curious if there were specific aspects you struggled with or if the whole thing was confusing?
Did you try the Practice Puzzle or jump right into the daily?
Practice puzzle: https://tiledwords.com/puzzles/practice
It sounds like you read the instructions but they weren’t enough. Maybe a video explainer would be better? Does the gameplay recording on this Reddit post help at all?
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestroyMyGame/comments/1osxb2q/i_re...
People really seem to like it once it clicks (Over 1100 people have finished the daily puzzle so far today) but there is a steep learning curve and I’d love to learn how to help people get past that initial hump.
It's very much a learn-by-doing game.
PS - This game is so fun. I don't usually do word games, but I can't stop playing this one.
- Add an optional video explainer on the How To Play screen
- Redesign How to Play to push you towards the practice puzzle more strongly
- Add more practice puzzles that ramp up in difficulty
I want to explore a future feature where dropping a tile “pushes” other tiles out of the way that will hopefully make it feel less cramped
i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.
I like that clue idea! I want to change how the reveals work. I’ll play with that!
Generating a custom sharing image is interesting!
(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.
there's a type of crossword called "diagramless" where you have the numbered clues and an empty grid
there was one in NYTimes Magazine Sunday puzzle page this past weekend
A more meta tip is if you make multiple games, try to have some genre or theme overlap so you can build a community among players of your games. I wish I had done this more with my more successful games (which are mobile games, not web games, but the same idea applies).
I found the instruction about double tapping a little confusing at first but figured it out as I played.
Nice work!
I solved the first puzzle: -Congratulations! -You solved Paprika with 18 slabs
But this was unclear: -You've solved 0 puzzles! -Reveal Rule -Next Puzzle -View Archive -You still have 2 guesses left. Finish guessing before revealing the rule if you're feeling brave!
I have to do 2 more guesses before I can reveal the rule that I already figured out?
Getting any of the guesses right counts as a win, and you get different guessing slabs for each guess (this latter part isn't made at all clear upfront).
If you have a rule in your head like "no red", but the true rule is "no red or orange", it's possible that on the guessing slabs those two rules evaluate to the same things (e.g. there weren't any oranges present in the guessing slabs). You could then try the rest of the guessing slabs, which might have an example where you get it wrong, giving more gameplay.
I wanted to give a victory on any subset of 5 slabs guessed successfully since trying to get all the guesses is very hard (especially the first guess on many puzzles), and you can get new information from guesses which fail, which offers some progression. Hence getting "you won" and the ability to reveal the rule (I've also thought about keeping the reveal unavailable until you do all guesses) and the invitation to keep playing.
If you have a minute I'd love to hear from you if that makes sense and if you have thoughts about what might make more sense. I've also tried to consider ways of restructuring the gameplay, e.g. automatically progressing to the next set of guessing slabs, such that the flow here is less confusing.
Thanks for playing, and for sharing!
This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!
I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.
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Yeah I felt odd reposting the Show HN but I thought that the HN crowd would enjoy the game if a post got traction
The game design is really good too. It has just the right amount of juice.
On large screens adding more space would be a big quality of life improvement.
But it doesn’t really work on smaller screens.
So far I’ve tried to keep the experience as similar as possible across devices but maybe that’s silly
As a non native it feels awesome to finish a puzzle like this haha
How do you market it – now or planning to, if I may ask?
I showcased at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game squad and that got me some players. I also shared it on my various personal social medias. The neighborhood board game store let me put up a poster!
I’m also hoping that organic sharing will drive growth.
This HN comment has been some of my most successful marketing so far. Around 2400 people from HN have visited since I posted!
I hope you make a success of this and sell it to the NYT for a disgusting amount of money.
This is a classic HN comment but I’d love a Thursday/Friday crossword difficulty equivalent in addition to the dailies which are a ~Monday.
