18 Words - Daily word challenge game

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 Relax Mode vs. Challenge Mode.

By the way: I really like the overall design of Zanagrams and 18 Words. These are small puzzle games with very simple, clean UIs. They work crisply and I've noticed you've been tidying up Zanagrams, adding minor features and settings. They have a very Classic Web feel to them. It's not like you're trying to get me to watch ads or subscribe to your newsletter or are just breadcrumbs to some for-profit thing. I like having a handful of very easy to pick up puzzles/toys when I need to fidget. They help keep me away from TikToks and Shorts.

Would be nice to have a ‘scramble!’ button so it makes it slightly easier when we get stuck

I like the idea, but I didn't like losing after a few words. Now it might just be me not being good at losing, but who is?

Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got:

|X|o|X|X|X|o|o|o|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|o|X| 13/18

https://wordnerd.co/23words/ is similar (but 23 words instead of 18).

Possibly the biggest difference is that 23 Words continues with the next word if you fail to get a word within 30 seconds. When you have attempted all 23 words it will present you with results like this.

You found 21/23 words

Top 7% of players today.

BUG:

I guessed "LATER", but it said - wrong and mentioned "ALERT". The only fix I would make is to ensure that all possible words with scrambled characters make sense.

LATER and ALERT are both correct, for text "A E R T L"

Update:

The game amazingly had 132,411 players yesterday and received tons of player feedback. After a long night talking with players and play testing I’ve shipped the following changes:

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1. I’ve kept the 30 second timer but you now continue through the whole 18 words to get a final score of x/18.

2. I’ve added a new share feature to better show your result in a similar Wordle style.

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Thanks again for all the feedback and for checking out the game!

I think there is probably a research paper hiding inside this game.

I couldn't guess Dice because, as an ESL person, I couldn't make the D-i combo sound like /d/+ /aɪ/ in my head (it sounded as /d/ + /ɪ/), so a part of my neural circuitry didn't fire, and I couldn't complete it with `ce.`

In other words I, personally, in this pattern recognition game rely on the way words sounds in my head to find familiar combinations and continue the sequence.

I'd appreciate a 'shuffle' button that just re-mixed-up the letters into a different order. I find this keeps me from obsessing on adjacent letter pairs that my eyes/brain lock onto.

I got the word BAITH on like turn 5, and I only chose that because I couldn't figure anything out. I thought it was a nonsense word. But mixing in a scottish slang word in the easy section was a surprise.