Wow, nice work. The Christmas themed wordsearch generator I posted here at Christmas had a single commenter.
Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
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Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would add that the answer detection logic should probably get beefed up a bit as well. When I solved today's puzzle, it counted "race car" as a wrong answer when it expected "racecar". It should accept both forms of a compound word (also "racecar" isn't a word but that's more minor).
But "race car" with a space isn't a palindrome.
It wouldn't be accepted by a palindrome-detecting function but it would generally be accepted by puzzle-solving conventions (e.g. for crosswords), which normally ignore spaces.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would add that the answer detection logic should probably get beefed up a bit as well. When I solved today's puzzle, it counted "race car" as a wrong answer when it expected "racecar". It should accept both forms of a compound word (also "racecar" isn't a word but that's more minor).
But "race car" with a space isn't a palindrome.
There's an ambiguity here between palindromic words and palindromic sentences (where punctuation and spacing are non-breaking):
"Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog"
or
"A man, a plan, a canal, Panama"
though it seems that all of the answers (in the one tutorial and one round that I played) are single words, often slid in as character insertions. Just go light on the spacebar, apparently.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#94I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!) The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles! HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone. FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal. This happened quick an…
That's awesome, congrats! I had a lot of fun solving today's puzzle. One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time tr…
Seconded. This would be super useful.
Amazing game!
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same thought, but agree with others that it's the core part of the game. I've played about a dozen of these now, and very often I can see what one of the big outer clues is way before I've worked out the inner clues. If I just solve the big outer clue, the game is done in 20 seconds or so, and I'm not sure I'd keep coming back. Rather, the challenge is to use what I've understood to work out the inner clues…
i think they're saying it shouldn't be counted as a fail, rather than it should be accepted as an answer at that point. if not i agree with you. it'd be nice if it flashed green or something around the entire set of brackets but made you still answer all the sub-clues though.
Eat it and make the user think it's a failure, but don't count it negatively towards the score.
"If you answer early, we'll ignore your guess without letting you on."
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#96I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!) The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles! HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone. FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal. This happened quick an…
That's awesome, congrats! I had a lot of fun solving today's puzzle. One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time tr…
Nice work - congratulations! ...and, yes - I had to paste the text of today's game into vi so I could use the bracket matching to untangle the clues... :)
Also, I would make it more obvious which clues are eligible for solving at the moment rather than penalizing us for not being able to discern which ones are.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not actually solving the puzzle, for one. Like half the steps are obviously nonsense.
Are you sure about that? It correctly solves the puzzle. Each step (though a little confusing to parse) does make sense in context.
The first line is already nonsense. The answer is obviously not "room".
Getting the correct final answer tells you nothing about the reasoning. The LLM will solve the puzzle even if you only pass it the sentence "the [] de Milo is discovered by a Greek []".
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#98Oh yes. I just received this through the RSS minutes ago:
# Introducing Bracket City: The Atlantic’s New Word Game
https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2025/04/i...
> Meet your next word-game obsession: Bracket City. Today we’re announcing that this fast-growing word puzzle - created earlier this year by an independent game designer - has a new home at The Atlantic. // In Bracket City, players solve nested layers of clues to uncover a fact about the given day in history. Each solved bracket reveals a part of the next, creating a chain reaction that eventually resolves the whole puzzle into a single sentence. Players earn city-themed ranks for success, such as “Commuter,” “Mayor,” or the coveted “Kingmaker” for a perfect puzzle. // Bracket City was created by Ben Gross and has rapidly amassed an audience of loyal players. Ben will continue to create daily puzzles with Caleb Madison, the director of games at The Atlantic.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#99I'm curious why you opted for a custom keyboard vs the built in one. It's not as good and unlike worldle it doesn't seem to really take advantage from custom keys.
Yeah, the keyboard ruins the fun I had playing this. It took 2-3 taps per letter on my phone for keys to register.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#100I would suggest using the device's default keyboard on mobile. It feels rather awkward having to use qwerty instead of the azerty I'm used to.
Same here... I use Dvorak and it always takes me a second to reorient (perhaps they wanted to show that you can only use certain characters?).