Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves

I made this game while working on a different project about teaching English spelling. I was reading about homophones and got struck by how much a homophone can transform the shape of a word, so I started experimenting with little games built on that.

I added a few more transforms, anagrams, verb/tense changes, but the answers kept coming out too obvious. I couldn't distort the word enough to make it interesting. The breakthrough was compound pairs. Jumping from one word to another through their compound (sea → horse, via seahorse) really obscures the path and that's when it suddenly got fun and unpredictable.

I've been sharing it with friends. I'm in the UK so mostly UK testers, fair warning that a couple of the homophones may lean British.

They've been playing daily and seem hooked, so it felt worth posting here. It's one puzzle a day mainly so I actually have time to hand pick puzzles that have a satisfying path. Today's puzzle is on the easy side but they can get really tricky. The name is from 'betwixt', the whole game is about moving between two words. I did clock afterwards that there's a 60s board game with the same name, but they're pretty different things.

Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves
twixt.games

Yeah it can be really tough. The tricky thing is finding a puzzle that a good majority of people (50-70%) can solve without hints. It's also super unpredictable to determine what people will find tricky. I thought today's puzzle was relatively straight forward, it's EYE -> TIRED. But now I'm realising that EYE has so many compound words which mean N blind alleys to explore before you land on the correct path.

And yes, TwixT does look like a really novel game! I've never really seen a peg board style board game before. I'll try find an old copy on eBay and give it a go.

This is a pretty awesome little game, seems more rewarding than most something-le games I've seen. Will share with friends.

Will you / could you add access to past puzzles? That's the first thing I looked for but couldn't find.

There are some fun ideas here, but also some rough edges. Using today's puzzle (steak->boring, which I have not solved yet) as an example:

-It's not clear to me whether the game is intended to accept any valid intermediate move or to only accept moves that lead to the correct solution. For a while, I though it only accepted correct moves, because it would not accept "steak->house" or "stake->holder" as valid moves, when I think those should clearly be valid "compound" actions (if I understand the rules correctly).

-On the other hand, I now realize that it wouldn't make sense to have an "undo" button if it were impossible to input valid but wrong moves. So maybe omitting steakhouse and stakeholder was an oversight? But now I've spend a while in a "dead end" when I thought the game was telling me I was on the right track.

-At this point, I've spend more time trying to figure this meta question about the rules than I have spent trying to solve the actual puzzle. It would help if the instructions or the game feedback made it clear whether "acceptance" = "correctness" or mere "validity".

-Also, I tried to start off with steak->stake as my homophone move, but it only accepts it as an anagram move. Obviously it's both, but there's no way for me to pick which one I want to use (and therefore free up the move I want to reserve for later).

> I'll try find an old copy on eBay and give it a go.

Do you have suitable opponents? If not, try playing on the internet:

https://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/games/gamedetail.jsp?gtid=tw...

(I'm very proud to have once won a championship there, also apparently I'm the highest rated player on the 48x48 board, yay!)