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Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

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Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#81

Post by pessimizer »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #63
bla3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also true when learning languages. If you speak a language a tiny bit, locals act politely impressed. If you speak it kind of good but aren't a native speaker, at least in some countries that lands much worse than speaking the language badly.

if you speak the language like crap and they've never seen you before they think aww, this tourist really tries. When you speak kind of good they know you live there damn it!

I used to always hear this about black Americans in France. You're unbelievably popular and everybody thinks you're charming and cool until your French gets too good. Then you start being mistaken for an African immigrant and go from being cute to getting spit on by strangers.

Actual advice from black people to other black people not to work on your accent.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#82

Post by dbg31415 »

It's really cute!

I'd change up the UX a bit.

1 - For the drag and drop, I'd keep the original letter in place, and just make the original slightly transparent as you drag. Reason being, as you drag on a phone you can't see the original letter since your finger is on it... so leaving the original as an indicator is good.

https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path...

2 - For the drag and drop, I would add a a "drop indicator" as you mouse over each square.

https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path...

3 - For things like "Triple Letter" I would change it up... "x3" -- I know you're going for "Scrabble" but frankly the text is a bit small for older people, who I think make up the "Dads" in your audience.

4 - Instead of "Delete" I would change the word to "Recall" for recalling letters you placed on the board.

5 - For the Colors I would go more vibrant.

6 - For font sizes, bigger is better. https://imgur.com/a/kduZzwl

7 - For buttons, I would suggest having different colors for different buttons. Having them all black means you have to read through them all... having one as a clear "primary" color helps.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#83

Post by MrLeap »

noduerme wrote: post #20

Like, this is neat. And fun. Small, simple and chill. So what I'm about to say is not specifically a knock against your game. What I've noticed lately on HN is this weird split where everything has to either be super basic - like, this game could have been literally written with BASIC in 1984 - or else it has to be an abstract conversation about the future of AI. With very little in the middle. What would be in the m…

I've got a project like that (few years working on it, it's very unique, there's a demo), I talk about it in the comments from time to time but haven't done a dedicated writeup or anything.

I don't think I've ever seen a youtube video get to the front page of HN, and that seems the easiest way for me to broadly communicate all that I've put into it. Some part of me thinks a medium post about it or whatever just wouldn't make sense. I want to present what you're hungry for, haha.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#84

Post by PeterWhittaker »

Symbiote wrote: post #68
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #52

Nit: it indicated I had chosen the 3rd highest scoring word, and listed a Latin word as first. Don’t normal scrabble words preclude foreign words?

The top word for today's puzzle is an English word. http://norvig.com/ngrams/ says it's the 28462-most-frequent English word, slightly more frequent than pronounce, lactating, aquamarine, sedimentation and slime.

Which word was that? I encountered this particular word (sadly, I do not remember the word) doing practice rounds.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#85

Post by PeterWhittaker »

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #84
Symbiote wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top word for today's puzzle is an English word. http://norvig.com/ngrams/ says it's the 28462-most-frequent English word, slightly more frequent than pronounce, lactating, aquamarine, sedimentation and slime.

Which word was that? I encountered this particular word (sadly, I do not remember the word) doing practice rounds.

Also, I just noticed that the practice rounds and the daily dadagram use different tiling.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#86

Post by erickhill »

danieltait wrote: post #2

This was a really fun game to make. We've been playing scrabble together for years so it's nice I'm finally competent enough to code this online version. I posted it on reddit and now over 1000 people are playing against my dad everyday haha.

So are you like Desmond on LOST where every day, after you and your dad play, you have to run to the computer to type in the latest Dad-Word to keep the machine alive?

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#87

Post by nyerp »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #76
nyerp wrote: post #71

Love it!! But you've GOT to improve the sharing feature. This is a great, accessible daily game. Connect it with Facebook, or at least give people something they can cut-and-paste without having to open an email client! And the information you provide below is good (it provides a bit of "braggy" info without giving the answer away) but I would make it more conversational, e.g., "I beat Dad!" and then "I beat Dad agai…

> But you've GOT to improve the sharing feature. This is a great, accessible daily game. Connect it with Facebook, or at least give people something they can cut-and-paste without having to open an email client! They're using the "Wordle" share method which worked insanely well, precisely due to the fact it didn't try to share with facebook or anything annoying, you just copy paste into an IM client

That's not correct, based on my experience. Yes, you could copy-and-paste the "results" page, but that contains the answer, so it's no good for sharing. To get the actual "share" text (using Chrome on Windows 11), I had to open an email client when prompted and then cut-and-paste the text from the email the game created.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#88

Post by sverona »

GNOMES wrote: post #74

Really fun! I beat your dad by 2 points lol. Feature that is missing vs actually playing Scrabble is the ability to play a fake word if other players do not call you out on it. I wonder if you could find a list of common misspelled words or fake words to allow, or could have some logic that compares the percentage word is misspelled by, and have the computer call it out as fake if it is over say 25% misspelled or som…

I have never met an AI that doesn't have the dictionary built in. If you want to play phonies check Woogles.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#89

Post by nebulous1 »

Tade0 wrote: post #33

I can't hope to beat an experienced native speaker at this game, but it might be useful for expanding my vocabulary. Case in point: my language doesn't really have a word for "almonry" - there's usually no dedicated space for collecting/dispensing alms. By far the best Scrabble player I ever encountered was a former corporate drone in his 50s, who hiked 40km+ daily in the Carpathians and was in charge of maintaining…

Be wary of the top answers it will give you. Quite a lot of the top answers will technically be words in English but are essentially completely unused and most people won't even know or understand them.

For instance, today's top words:

Obvert - I know this one but it isn't too common.

Overt - This was my answer, it's not uncommon.

Over - Common

Evo - I've never seen this used as a word other than a name.

Bevor - Apparently this is medieval neck armour. Uncommon.

Ouvert - From ballet according to the internet. Uncommon, although I know it as a French word.

Note this isn't the game's fault, they're all in the scrabble dictionary it's using. These words are only useful if you want to win scrabble, not if you want to speak English.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#90

Post by danieltait »

jfindley wrote: post #70
danieltait wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm yes ok I just removed the refresh now. The reason it was there is some days I opened the tab on my iphone and for some reason it still showed the yesterdays result rather than the new day's letters. Will have a think of a better way to force the refresh of the letters on a new day.

This is still happening btw - if I quickly switch to another tab it resets the board completely, giving me a different puzzle in practice mode. This makes it sadly unusable for me.

Sorry! I had only changed for the daily. Removed from practice and play now as well
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