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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?

#91
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to start the word in the first square. I've just added an error message to highlight that when you try submit. Thanks for the feedback!

Some unstated things that I didn’t understand, if it helps make the game better: - You don’t have to use all letters. - You do have to start the word all the way to the left. - It has to be a valid scrabble word before you get any feedback at all. I think you should try to give much more feedback when the player tries different things, so they have a chance to figure out the rules.

I've added an instructions page now, thanks!

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

#92
post #83

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 would…

You might have a better shot if you write a blog post that includes video elements.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to start the word in the first square. I've just added an error message to highlight that when you try submit. Thanks for the feedback!

The error message doesn't appear to show up on practice mode yet? I do see it on the regular mode though.

Updated now thanks!

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

#94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

same on mac - I had to open it in Notes

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

#95
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

weird, for me it copied the sharing text

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

#96

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…

Same reason why there are so few mid-budget movies in Hollywood, and why medium size business either become giants or die.

Cheap stuff is easy to churn out -> low chance of success, x many shots

Expensive stuff costs a lot to be the best, and gets big payoff.

Middle-tier stuff costs too much for its benefits.

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

#100
Well... I'm kinda a jerk for this, but it's also a free lesson on why global variables are baaaaad.

Also, I wrote this in seconds and I know it could be more efficient / cleaner. don't @ me.

Toss this in your browser's dev console to get the best word available for each puzzle instantly

    function solvePuzzle(puzzle, words) {
        const letters = {};
        puzzle.forEach(l => {
            if (!letters[l]) {
                letters[l] = 0;
            }
            letters[l]++;
        });

        let best = '';
        words.forEach(word => {
            if (word.length > puzzle.length) {
                return;
            }
            const has = { ...letters };
            for (let i = 0; i  best.length) {
                best = word;
            }
        });
        return best;
    }

    // lettersarray and wordlist are both globally available
    solvePuzzle(lettersarray, wordlist);
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