Show HN: Zanagrams

(zanagrams.com)

79 points | by pompomsheep 4 hours ago

21 comments

  • acrophiliac 3 minutes ago
    I'm stuck. Does that mean I chose the wrong word earlier and used up an essential letter? Does the sequence of word guesses matter? Is there an Undo feature so I can back up and try a different order of guesses? Can I get a hint? Is there a way to give up and see the solution (order of word guesses)?
  • dpfu 7 minutes ago
    Nice game! I found 20 words.

    I was a bit stunned by the concept of "bonus words". I found that every word should count. Also because some words are just plural forms (e.g. stroke+s), so kinda cheep?!

    Keep ups the good work!

  • wkjagt 24 minutes ago
    This is so much fun. And something while playing reminded me of a this video I saw where someone asks her boyfriend "what does Y-E-S spell", and he said "yes". Then she asked him what "E-Y-E-S" spelled, and he couldn't figure it out (he kept saying "eee... yes?"). Anyway, I was looking at the remaining letters with just one word left to go. Four of them formed a word I had already guessed, plus one letter, but didn't make any sense with that additional letter. Until it did. I won't spoil which was it was, but it was in puzzle #1.
  • jasonpeacock 2 hours ago
    It’s basically Ribbit from Puzzmo, which is fine because reimplementations let you experiment with different gameplay.

    https://www.puzzmo.com

    • abound 2 hours ago
      Came here to say this, Ribbit is a lot of fun, and Puzzmo in general is a really solid site.
  • iku 41 minutes ago
    Great puzzle! Is there a way to give up and see all the answers? After 20 minutes or so still have 8 words to find. (Not a native English speaker.)
  • a-l-e-c 46 minutes ago
    Simple and fun, appreciate the definitions! Was wondering about ideas for creating a simple game using the vocab list from my koreader app, but will probably need to be a crossword type game where I need to match definitions with words. This just reminded me of that :)
  • iKlsR 1 hour ago
    Pretty fun, took me about 10 minutes but found 24 words 10 of them bonus. This was #5 for future viewers.

    Edit: welp, spent another 15 mins and managed to solve the previous 4. Currently whipping up a custom version for myself that gives a new set of words related to a theme on each solve, love it.

  • ctenb 1 hour ago
    Cool that they list the definitions of the words afterwards. This makes it even more fun for non-native speakers, as it adds a free learning aspect to it.
  • ggaswint 49 minutes ago
    Love how the connections disappear once the letter is used up. Feels progressive
  • almara 3 hours ago
    Fun! I like how the puzzle naturally gets easier as you solve it. How do you decide which words to include?
    • pompomsheep 3 hours ago
      Thanks. I use a combination of AI to first score the words by obscurity and then manually decide which ones to include based on this score and my own judgement.

      I then manually test each of the puzzles and throw out any that I feel weren't "fun" to solve for whatever reason

  • em-bee 2 hours ago
    the score should include how many bonus words you found (out of how many there were in total) and instead of time it should count how many tries you made because technically you could brute force this and try all combinations. counting each try would eliminate that (for anyone trying to get a high score)
  • NDlurker 3 hours ago
    Cool game. Snus isn't in the word list btw

    Found six bonus words.

  • blfr 3 hours ago
    I like that it also handles words that aren't planned in. You get a nice "bonus word" popout.
    • msla 3 hours ago
      Yeah, I got "TUNS" as a bonus word.
      • philsnow 1 hour ago
        Yeah tuns (a word well known to homebrewers) is not as esoteric as yttria (a word known to.. chemists?)
      • smitty1e 2 hours ago
        Not sure how to vote for it, though.
  • purple-leafy 1 hour ago
    Cool game! Well that’s a sign I need to launch my word game this week if any
  • cryptoboy2283 3 hours ago
  • urostrstenjak 3 hours ago
    Interesting game! Is this an original idea? Is there plan to add "endless" number of zanagrams?
  • moomin 1 hour ago
    Feels very like Squaredle.
  • mateenah 1 hour ago
    pretty cool. how are you deciding or generating puzzles ?
  • msla 3 hours ago
    There are a couple of games like this on Android I play:

    https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.vayunmathur.gam...

    https://github.com/plhosk/wordtracer

    They're both on FDroid

  • rd3i 19 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • aevv 2 hours ago
    [dead]