Currently
https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
https://games.oec.world/en/tradle/
https://www.namethatnation.com/
https://triword.net/ <--- the new one
https://squaredle.app/ (you can also just type if you find swiping annoying)
Some sort of progress would be nice, even if it's just a list of past guesses. Perhaps do what Wordle does - show if guessed letters are in the right place or present in the answer.
With regards to lifelines - allow selecting which letter to reveal. Because in today's puzzle case it's obvious that it's --A, so "reveal the last letter" lifeline is basically useless.
As for the letter lifeline, I am curious how you decided that the third letter's identity is obvious. There are plenty of words that end in ISS, IZE, and ILL, not to mention OSS, OZE, and OLL (e.g. SCROLL, EXTOLL). There is also USS, UZE, and ULL, (e.g. GAUZE, TRUSS, BULL, although they don't fit.)
When the player guesses three letters, e.g. if they guess BRA, they're implicitly asking whether the answer is BRASS/ZEBRA/?????. For each of those words, there are several ways their guess can be "wrong": (1) The guess doesn't fit this clue at all: none of BRALL, LBRAL, LLBRA is a word. (2) The guess fits this clue, but its placement is wrong: ZEBRA is a word, but we're actually expecting ___ZE, not ZE___. (3) The guess fits this clue, but it's not the expected word: BRASS is a word, but only the A is in the right place to match the underlying expected word. ZEBRA is a word, but none of the letters are a match.
You should surface some of that new information to the player. You could do that Wordle-style by just surfacing it automatically with no further interaction; or, since there are sometimes different kinds of new information, you could let the player interactively choose what kind of new information they'd like to see as a reward for their guess: See which letters are right? See which placements are right? And so on. And, since there are three clues in play at once, maybe you allow the player to get new information from only one clue per guess.
Concretely: The clues are SS/ZE/LL. The player guesses BRA. You fill in "BRASS" and "ZEBRA" in yellow and "BRALL" in red. Tools appear to the right of BRASS — "Check placement" and "Check letters" — and also to the right of ZEBRA. The player clicks "Check placement" on ZEBRA and gets a negative response (which is recorded visibly somehow). A new prompt appears. The player guesses PAR. You fill in "SPARS" in yellow, PARZE and PARLL in red. Tools appear to the right of SPARS. The player clicks "Check letters" and the A turns green, indicating that the first word has an A in the third position. (Maybe the second S also turns green, and the first S turns yellow — Wordle rules. But that feels redundant with "Check placement.") Alternatively, the A turns yellow, indicating that there's an A somewhere in the correct three-letter answer; and the P and R are grayed out on the keyboard. A new prompt appears... And so on.
This kind of progression would make the game much more engaging!
I was almost turned off of Connections by the poor instructions.
The instructions say that categories 'will always be more specific than "5-LETTER WORDS," "NAMES" or "VERBS"'.
Then one of the first puzzles I did had "PRONOUNS" as a category! That did not make a good first impression.
The interface also probably turns off some people who would otherwise enjoy it. It would be greatly improved if they replaced the "Shuffle" with letting you re-arrange the words by dragging them.
If there is any kind of progression, I could imagine it just being successive hints:
- One random letter, but no information about placement - The correct placement of the random letter in the affix - The correct placement of the affix to the stems
But really, I think the simplicity of this as a pure logic puzzle is great all on its own.
If I have my three letters, then I can easily see for myself whether or not my guess is correct just by looking at the screen; the input field does not help me at all.
Perhaps choose a different design if you don't want people to associate affordances from that game with this.
2/19/2024: (spoiler) one alternative solution is 'BRA' [0], but that's not accepted.
Out of curiosity though, do you ensure there is only one solution for each challenge?
Each puzzle has only one solution, so if you find one that doesn't work with 1 or more extremely uncommon words, it's safe to assume that's not the solution.
Maybe I should add a reveal option for when someone feels done with it.
so i reloaded several times to remove each letter that wasn't there every time... well it looks like there is only the M left and yet the the answer is not MMA
Sorry about that though. For now, if you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.
Cow, Flower, Hop: The answer is "bell" (cowbell, bellflower, bellhop)
You can ratchet up the difficulty by allowing homophones or proper nouns, for example: Tall, Spin, Fox...
My brother and I use to make them up and play each other on long car rides during summer vacations.
