Show HN: 18 Words • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#81

Post by wrsh07 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and I’m not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. I’ve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game. If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Rel…

I think Zach Gage (developer of excellent games including Really Bad Chess, Spelltower, etc) says on Adam Conover's podcast that for many people they have difficulty improving at a skill when they have time (or other) pressure

Thus, he always includes a relaxed mode to let someone practice without any stress. Incidentally, he realized that some people only ever play in the relaxed mode!

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#82

Post by swordlucky666 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#83

Post by altmanaltman » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

paisawalla wrote: post #38

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and I’m not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. I’ve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game. If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Rel…

I would appreciate the timer not turning red. It's better to be surprised that time's up, rather than be surprised to know it's running out.

Yeah I think this will be a bit too easy without a timer. But that ui does make it kind of intense, i forgot how to spell a basic word because i was thinking i only have 10 red seconds left

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#84

Post by wrsh07 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #66

I can understand the clock running out meaning a loss - but I still want to play the rest of the words? how do I do that? I don't think they are accessible anymore

A continue that let's you keep playing would be fun. Or maybe different modes (eg hard vs normal)

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#85

Post by jrflo » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

chadgpt3 wrote: post #43

LAMER is a real word and COLOR is not.

Depends on which side of the pond (or Canadian border?) you're on ;)

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#86

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #80

I like the time based ness. 30 seconds is plenty of time and one run a day is a nice change of pace from never ending feeds. Good job, I got 15/18

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#87

Post by sceptic123 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and I’m not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. I’ve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game. If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Rel…

Having a timer is maybe not so much the problem, but there's no reward here for doing early words quickly and no appreciation for the fact that difficulty is not linear. Would be nice if you could bank up some time for when harder ones come.

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#88

Post by fsckboy » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

pompomsheep wrote: post #15

functionmouse wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbh this should accept all dictionary matches

Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be? I do have another version where it accepts ANY word but I found it quite unsatisfying when I survived by randomly spamming combinations and finding a really obscure word. So am currently running it against a 20,000 word wordlist instead of my larger 300,000 wordlist

Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?

EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#89

Post by pocksuppet » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

nathell wrote: post #42

Could I have the source code so I can plug in the Polish word list? It would make a great training app for Scrabble.

It's unobfuscated. Right click, view source, there it is.

Re: Show HN: 18 Words

#90

Post by lucideer » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and I’m not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. I’ve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game. If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Rel…

Agree on the timer.

In one sense I really enjoy the timer up to the point that I lose, but it feels very unsatisfactory, especially if I lose early, & I'm acutely aware the difficulty level it's set at will be experienced radically differently by different players (to the exclusion of most I would imagine).

Having a timerless mode is very much needed as an option - there's no real risk of "cheating" with these cookie-based browser games anyway since I could just have infinite retries in a private tab if I felt like doing that.