Show HN: Truncate, a word-based strategy game (truncate.town)
Truncate is a chess flavoured word game that blends spatial reasoning and wordplay. In puzzle mode, you beat back your NPC opponent's words and take over their territory.
Truncate started as a pen and paper game between a friend and I, evolved into a handmade board game, and finally arrived at an online puzzle game. Like any good word game, there is of course a daily mode, shareable with the tried and true grid of emojis
We've been playtesting it with friends and family for a few months, which has helped iron out the tutorials and gameplay, and we're finally happy with an MVP worth sharing!
Technical deets: The client and server are written in Rust, with the visuals built using egui (as an experiment in Rust's GUI ecosystem).
We'd love any feedback!
117 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadIf I forget a specific point it's frustrating to have to go through the whole tutorial again.
It would help if it had a license file in the repo in order to express what rights you grant to others
(Thanks for pointing out the font — I do have an issue for that (https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/issues/111) so it's nice to get validation on its importance)
But congrats on this, it's awesome!
We have been on the fence about this (and still are!). One option is to add this kind of UI in a "tutor" mode that starts on, and can be opt-out at some point. Not sold on it yet, but mulling it over.
* Doesn't include useful but rare short words, such as el
* Does include obscure or slang words such as stere and jones
* But doesn't include their conjugations. I lost due to making steres without checking to see if the game knows the plural (it doesn't).
I'd like to add a button to the dictionary to report words that should be included. For now, we erred on the side of a smaller dictionary since it's less jarring to add words than remove them :)
(stere / steres is especially regrettable, sorry!)
Obtaining a good word list is hard, I have one saved which is a merging and editing of several freely available ones, including one used in Scrabble competitions and one from some Linux distro, and a few "basic word lists". There will be endless errors like missing plurals and past tenses, as well as the inclusion of things like acronyms that shouldn't be in there at all. And if you prune obscure words but allow the submission of missing words, I guess you'd better keep the list of pruned words around so you can head people off at the pass by pre-filtering their submissions.
We have done some manual massaging beyond that, but not much. Waiting for more feedback like this! You can see the current tranches of dictionary massaging here: https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/tree/main/dict_buil...
One thing that might help would be for the winning word, and all the other words involved, to be shown somewhere upon a battle's resolution, along with their definition (or lack thereof).
Incidentally, some buttons don't work for me. This [i] button won't toggle back to off, and the buttons in the "edit board" function mostly don't work - including "stop editing board".
> Only words touching another player's words are involved in a battle. This means you can win battles even though your board contains invalid words.
> Try playing playing "TO" against your opponent's "FT".
> Even though your board is mostly valid, the only words involved in the battle were "TO" and "FT", so you won and "FT" was removed from the board.
This doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that "TO" should only battle the opponent's "F" because the opponent has "TOUR" adjacent to "F".
If my interpretation was right, only "F" should have been removed.
Thanks for pointing it out! It's something we have had come up before, and the sort of thing we keep iterating the tutorial toward explaining better, so we'll take another crack at it!
But (pedantic note) it is a little more specific than that. It includes ALL letters until the edge of the board or space on the board. Right?
Do most people consider an invalid word to be a kind of word? I don't think I do, and I think this was the source of my confusion. But I'm not a word-game person per se nor Scrabble expert... this might be obvious to other people.
Something around this might be a starting point to summarize the battle rules: to win, a player's attacking letter requires two things. (1) All of the attacker's touching words to be valid; (2) At least one attacking word to be 2 letters longer than one of the defender's valid words. (But I don't this is all of it. It probably needs revision.)
Aside: I'm not sure what the _minimum_ level of complexity for the rules _could_ be. I get the impression these rules were chosen to make the game more interesting. Having known some game-creators, it is common for game rules to be play tested. But there is always the question of "play tested for what audience?"
P.S. I like the game so far. A lot. I see a lot of potential in it, but yeah, it is significantly more complex than Scrabble.
Aside: For instance, +1 is the defender's advantage in Risk, and I always loved the mechanics added by the Lord of the Rings version (and maybe other versions) where you could modify that advantage to anything from +0 (with a "leader" in the attacking army), to +3 (with a leader in a defending army on a tile with a "stronghold"). This is a bit different because it isn't dice rolls, but a similar idea.
Hmm, that's apparently sourced from Wiktionary. Wiktionary is great, but has a very broad concept of "word".
Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with?
I tried to get through the tutorial , but could not. Maybe simplify the rules or simplify the game before I'd play, but others may enjoy.
I do play wordle and other NYTimes word games , and scrabble, so I'm not averse to those types of games.
Maybe I should have had a cup of coffee first. I will try again later.
But still hats off for creating it. Congratulations.
Agreed on the reading-upside-down thing, though I think it's still the right choice. But I suspect it's something anyone playing the game regularly would become adept at very quickly. Maybe just add a quick "rotate board" button / hotkey to use when evaluating the opponent's position.
I think my one minor criticism is the "touching the opponent's town" thing. I find that it's not a particularly fun goal. Many such things go with a "war" analogy to add some interest, like an army destroying the opponent's fortress or whatever. If you'd prefer to avoid that (though the "attacking" and "defending" language is already in the game), it could be like you're building a path for a rabbit to get a carrot, or maybe it's water and you're building a bridge to the other side.
Or the win state could instead be to eliminate all the opponent's letters. As-is, that would eliminate the fun "racing" mechanic, which would be unfortunate. But perhaps (going back to the bridge idea), the "town" squares could be like bridge supports, and reaching one would knock out anything it is "holding up". So you could still race to knock out the critical "root" support, which would usually win in nearly the same way as currently (but maybe with a few more cleanup moves).
Love the game! Hope the ideas are interesting rather than annoying :)
Edit to add: Oh! One thing I actually missed in the tutorial (but figured out in the example game) is that words must be valid top-to-bottom or left-to-right. I was confused by the outcome of some battles in my initial games, due to building "valid" words bottom-to-top only to see them defeated by shorter ones. Relatedly, maybe in the "easy" modes, valid words could be highlighted? Then I would have known that when I built "yria" from top-to-bottom, it was not actually the valid word "airy" read from bottom-to-top.
Yes, we once posited that you were trying to deliver soup to the other town haha. The current language is really in lieu of figuring out what the best lore for the game is, and these are great suggestions we can mull over :)
> Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with?
Much like us, the NPC can be plagued with a simply terrible hand ;)
Again, appreciate the notes!
This desperately needs a attack result preview, or if that's too hard at least a "you're starting an attack you'll lose" warning of some kind. The combat resolution rules are unintuitive, and I keep sometimes incorrectly predicting the results, and sometimes even not understanding why I lost despite the information in the battle pane. Losing an attack is so crippling that you might as well resign.
It doesn't help that the only place to find the rules is scattered about in a tedious tutorial. The tutorial itself can't be fixed; it's the nature of tutorials to suck. But it'd be great to have a help page with the rules accessible somewhere. The rules aren't long, so it doesn't seem incompatible with the aesthetics of the game.
> This desperately needs a attack result preview
Not too hard, just waiting for all the feedback to roll in before deciding either way. If we stay sitting on the fence, it might make its way in as a "tutor" mode :)
That's not the case here; any time you attack, there are two possible end states for the board. It's often not immediately obvious which of the two you'll end up in, but the outcome is deterministic and the process to determine the outcome is mechanical. The optimal way to play the game is to just manually do all these mechanical dictionary lookups and rule checks. That's tedious, not fun.
Having a battle preview (and word highlighting as suggested elsewhere) wouldn't actually remove any of the actual skill involved in memorizing a word list, reading upside down, or being able to visualize the outcomes. Having that knowledge is a prerequisite for building a good board. All that these better visualizations achieve is allow people to build that knowledge and those skills organically while playing the game.
And "playing the game" is a key part there. In the current state the game is so unergonomic that I predict 99.9% of the players bounce before winning a single game on the easiest difficulty, and never return. Chess can afford to be harsh and unforgiving because it's got hundreds of years of momentum behind it, and a history of being played on a board without any digital quality of life features. New games don't have that benefit.
It's probably more instructive to look at other word games. What happens in Scrabble if you use an invalid word? You forfeit a turn. Worldle? Nothing. In this game you'll lose a dozen rounds worth of board development.
- Opening the dictionary lookup requires two clicks, and then a third to focus the text entry. It needs a hotkey, and must focus the text entry no matter how it was opened.
- I'd expect to be able to dismiss the dictionary lookup page with Esc, but it requires yet one click.
- The dictionary lookup covers up parts of the board, and makes the visible parts hard to read. This makes looking up multiple words in one go pretty inconvenient.
Agree on all front re: the dictionary ergonomics. We'll look at smoothing that out (mobile is currently the blocker there, but everything is solvable :)
Re: visualizations, you make great points. Definitely something for us to mull over, and I do think some amount of this will make it into the game (at least behind an option, which defaults to on).
Thanks again!
Yup, I like a good puzzle game but the interface is limiting and (despite reading the tutorial numerous times) the battle results aren't intuitive. I'd describe my reaction as "immediate disinterest".
I'm not sure what you mean by this. What are the two possible end states? You mean, depending on whether the tile you placed results in a valid or invalid word? I guess I think a limited more form of the suggestion, just indicating whether the new words are valid, would be ok.
> The optimal way to play the game is to just manually do all these mechanical dictionary lookups and rule checks.
I don't think so? The optimal way to play has to do with planning ahead based on the current board and your hand and the probability that you'll draw different letters. Understanding how attacks are going to resolve isn't one of the hard parts; I'm sorry for the chess analogies, but (assuming you know whether your resulting words are valid) it is just akin to counting how many attackers and defenders a square will have after you put a piece there, to determine if you're blundering it for free or losing a trade.
> It's probably more instructive to look at other word games.
I'm not so sure, because those games don't have as much interactivity between the sides (or any sides at all). I think the better analogy might be games that have a "battle resolution" step. This game's resolution step is a bit more complex than games like Risk, but far less complex than games like MtG. But in all of those games, part of reaching the right answer to the question of "is it a good idea to attack?" involves having a good understanding of what will happen if you do, and asking a computer for that answer is lame, IMO.
> New games don't have that benefit.
This seems like an argument for new games to cater to a least common denominator. That's right if the goal is to get bought by the NYT, but I think it's a bummer for labors of love.
But it's not just because you played an invalid word thinking it valid, which is what you're suggesting could be fixed. It could also be because something the opponent played that looks like gibberish is actually valid, because you're misunderstanding which words are contributing to a battle, or because you've misunderstood some part of the battle rules entirely.
Every single new player is going to be making all of those mistakes, and not just once. Each time that happens, the game in its current form is basically slapping them in the face because of how big the impact of mispredicting the outcome is. Now, most people don't like being hit in the face and will try to avoid it. By insisting that overcoming a bad UI is just another skill, you're pretty much ensuring that most players are driven away before they can be bothered to overcome the UI.
> The optimal way to play has to do with planning ahead based on the current board and your hand and the probability that you'll draw different letters
Yes, that's what the game would be about ideally. But that's not what the game is right now. In the current state, what matters the most is not making blunders. You know, the part that you earlier claimed just in the previous message was particularly fun and would be destroyed if the UI was fixed. And there is no actual skill involved in avoiding these blunders. It's just mechanical checking of words and the application of the somewhat unintuitive battle rules.
Why are you so insistent on making the game be about rote dictionary checks rather than about the strategy of building a good board?
> The optimal way to play has to do with planning ahead based on the current board and your hand and the probability that you'll draw different letters.
Even of a labor of love, I'd imagine the goal is to build an active player base. I believe that the game in its current state will not be able to do that, and it's entirely due to bad ergonomics and onboarding. Those should not be a line in the sand! The problems seem entirely fixable without compromising the core design of the game in any way.
I mean, I could be wrong. But the good news is that the only person whose opinion actually matters (the OP) should be in a position to evaluate this feedback now. It's a day since the Show HN post, and based on the score I'm guessing that about 10k-20k unique players hit the site as a result. Since the game has a server component, the author should have stats on their progression.
How many players finished a game? How many came back the next day for another daily "puzzle"? I'm betting it's a really low percentage for both. If that's the case, then the feedback in this Show HN (not just mine) is pretty clear on what to fix. While if the players aren't actually bouncing off the game, the feedback can probably be ignored :)
I'm coming around to the view that highlighting all valid words would be useful, even outside a "tutor mode", but I'm not sympathetic to the rest of this. Reasoning about how somewhat-complex rules interact is an important part of games with such rules. It lets people with a better grasp of the rules take advantage of opponents making mistakes due to their weaker understanding, or setting traps for them to fall into. Popping up a warning message that gives away the trap and lets you undo your move so as to not fall into it decreases the richness of a game.
I'm sorry again, but it just really strikes me as being the same basic thing as a chess client saying "if you move your queen here you're going to be susceptible to a knight fork, confirm move?". And that would be lame.
> Every single new player is going to be making all of those mistakes, and not just once.
Yes, but this is just a "tutor mode" thing. I agree that a hand-holding experience while people learn the rules would be extremely useful. But I don't want it to hold my hand like this when I'm playing the real game.
"You need to learn the rules well to be good at the game" is not "a bad UI".
> In the current state, what matters the most is not making blunders.
I'm sorry, but no. I played for about an hour and learned the rules for resolving battles. They are a bit complex but they aren't as hard to learn as you're claiming!
It's still a very hard game, but not because of blunders. It's hard because I didn't use my hand well at the start, or I went the wrong direction and got taken advantage of on another flank.
I really just don't relate to this battle resolution thing being such a big issue, after even a small amount of play.
And I honestly have no clue what you're talking about with "making the game be about rote dictionary checks". Again, I don't find this to be the case at all, and find myself using the dictionary infrequently. I have come around to there being some UI improvement here that could be useful, but it's on the margin, not a foundational issue I'm having playing the game.
> Even of a labor of love, I'd imagine the goal is to build an active player base.
Yes, but there is not a single definition of what that means. Some successful games (and things in general) are broad and shallow and others are narrow and deep. This is not going to be as popular as Wordle. It's way harder and will appeal to way fewer people. But the people it does appeal to may enjoy it more. Lots of people play Wordle a lot, while fewer people are dedicated to doing the Sunday Crossword each week. Both are fine.
> But the good news is that the only person whose opinion actually matters (the OP) should be in a position to evaluate this feedback now.
On this we agree entirely! And for sure there are lots of improvements that can be made, I'm just unconvinced that it needs so much more handholding as you're suggesting, and would find it less of a fun challenge if it did.
> They are a bit complex but they aren't as hard to learn as you're claiming!
You're trying to have it both ways here! :)
One moment the rules are so simple to learn and apply such that people will master them within minutes, the next moment the game is about players exploiting their opponents weaker grasp of the rules. Which one is it?
I assume you're not trying to optimize for the UX of an experienced player bullying a newbie.
> I'm sorry again, but it just really strikes me as being the same basic thing as a chess client saying "if you move your queen here you're going to be susceptible to a knight fork, confirm move?". And that would be lame.
Again: this game is not chess with hundreds of years of history of being played in a very particular way. It's a digital-only game with no cultural cachet. It doesn't get evaluated by the same criteria as chess. It's unfair, but it is also the reality. A digital game has different affordances and capabilities than a physical one.
Your specific example is bad, because it's talking about potential, not certainty. If you make a move, that's the state the board ends up in. (Unless the move was invalid, and then no chess program will let you do it at all). Now, that move might have left you exposed in one way or another. But there's no guarantee that the opponent notices it, or chooses to exploit it.
By contrast, in this game the battle resolution is completely deterministic. Their blunder is automatically exploited. All you're doing by showing a preview of the results is to either signal to the player that they have completely misunderstood the rules or the dictionary.
That's a huge difference. I pointed that difference out already a few posts back, and you are just offering up exactly the same example again. Do you not see the distinction? Do you disagree with it?
Digital games in general have different capabilities than physical ones and require different affordances. I have implemented a digital version of a popular board game, with tens of thousands of players, and put a lot of effort into highlighting information that the player really needed without ever playing the game for them. E.g. the game has multiple component limits ("can't hold more than X of this resource type", "can't build more than Y of this building type"), and I'd always highlight the components where the limit was about to be hit in the UI.
Did it remove a skill in the game of always double-checking each component type before committing a move? Sure. Did it lead to players actually being able to concentrate on actual strategy rather than doing trivial checks? Almost certainly. Did anyone ever complain about those UI affordances? No, literally never. Actually the opposite, adding new QoL features was the thing that players were most likely to send thank you emails about.
> I really just don't relate to this battle resolution thing being such a big issue, after even a small amount of play.
Sure. I genuinely believe that, and it's great for you. Could you also grant others the same courtesy, and believe what they post about their experience with the game is true?
The thing I really can't relate to here is you arguing against simple QoL changes. They're not taking anything away from you. You'll still easily be able to defeat worse players, because they'll have built a worse board. But at least those worse players will be around to be defeated, because the game didn't just immediately push them away.
> And I honestly have no clue what you're talking about with "making the game be about rote dictionary checks".
Well, you did originally claim that the fun in the game was in avoiding blunders...
The only way I see of avoiding blunders is to check every potential word against...
I don't think so? It's both things. It's not that hard to learn the rules well, and applying the rules well is also an advantage. I don't see a contradiction here. This is the case for many many games.
> I assume you're not trying to optimize for the UX of an experienced player bullying a newbie.
Newbies should use a tutor mode! I just don't want the primary mode of the game to be watered down.
> Do you not see the distinction? Do you disagree with it?
I do see the distinction you're drawing! And frankly, you've (belatedly, sorry about that) convinced me that chess is a poor analogy, for this reason.
> Could you also grant others the same courtesy, and believe what they post about their experience with the game is true?
Yes? But where does that get us? I'm happy to grant you and others the courtesy of believing you when you say that you find the battle resolution rules super hard to figure out, but I also don't want the game's creator to think that everyone feels that way, and modify their game to be more boring and rote because of everyone commenting expressing that same feeling. Which is why I started out my first reply in this thread by saying that personally I think (some of) the changes you're proposing would be a bummer.
> The thing I really can't relate to here is you arguing against simple QoL changes.
To me, what you think are "simple QoL changes" sound to me like "the official client of the game should include a cheat-bot", which is fine and all, I just think it would be lame and less fun that way. I just don't really want the game's client to tell you "that move totally sucks, are you sure you want to make it?".
> Well, you did originally claim that the fun in the game was in avoiding blunders...
I didn't say that.
> What challenge is being removed from you?
In all games, part of the fun is in figuring out what is going to happen when you do something. Having the computer tell me that ahead of time, so that I can then not do that thing if it sucks, is the challenge being removed from me.
Eg:
Defender bonus = 2
Shortest word = 2 (*in*, top, sugar)
Attacker word = 5 (*twine*)
Attacker wins (5-4=1)
At least for me I’m always getting ganked and trying to decipher the battle log to see why it didn’t do what I expected.
That being said, thanks it is fun.
One way to fix the tutorial is to make it more interactive than just asking players to place a specific tile in a specific place. Once you explain the most fundamental rules, introduce subsequent ones in the form of mini games where players decide what tiles to put and where, and can lose. Have a look at the Queen's Gambit game about chess. It is free if you have a Netflix subscription.
One feature that I would request is to let me organize my tiles. Just my 2 cents.
I also agree with the other comment that said knowing the outcome of your potential move would be helpful. Maybe even a training mode where every time you're about to self-own, the game displays a question mark and gives you a chance to retract the move.
The only other thing is, and I don't know how much it would impact gameplay, but having two-letter words count as valid seems like a cheat somehow because of all the sketchy ones like "oi" and "er." I wish the game could be configured to only accept 3+ letter words.
Overall, gameplay was interesting, but as it stands, not addictive.
1. Maybe (definitely maybe, not sure about this) highlight valid and invalid words on the board. It depends on the emphasis. The (scrabble?) dictionary is large and capricious.
2. The rules for battles seem counterintuitive: if you have an invalid word and a winning word, the invalid word loses, but if you have a losing word and a winning word, the winning word wins? And if your opponent has a winning word and a losing or invalid word, their losing/invalid word goes away, but their winning word stays (except any letters touching your placed tile) while if you have an invalid word and a winning word, your whole winning word goes away?
3. What happens in a battle between two invalid words?
Again, congrats, and especially on doing this in rust, it must be super-performant :-)
On 1. — this is definitely the most common piece of feedback so far, so we'll certainly look into it.
On 2. — the battles rules are the most complex part of the game, since they have evolved through the play testing and battle analogies. Our intuition has been that an invalid attacker "sabotages" the battle, and makes the whole attack fail (i.e. an ineffective army rushing a position will often lose in its entirety). And a short-but-valid word is a competent soldier who just isn't strong enough to win on their own :) Possibly something for us to explain more in one of the tutorial/lore/explanation areas.
On 3. — defenders aren't even evaluated if the attacker fails, so the attacking invalid word is removed.
Thanks again, great feedback :)
For example, when you draw a new tile, it could slide in, or glow/sparkle, helping draw your attention to it. When it just appears, it’s not immediately clear which tile just changed.
Battles in particular would benefit from animation, highlighting which words are valid/invalid, which particular words are the “strongest” words on each side, and which tiles are truncated in the aftermath.
These animations don’t need to be long or elaborate, and advanced players may even want to toggle them off, but they will be very helpful for newer players.
I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles. Getting a rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to waste turns playing them out knowing they will weaken your board and get destroyed.
> it feels like you have to win (or lose) quickly, else the middle board gets cramped and it bogs down to a long slog.
Why is that a bad thing? If games always resulted in a quick win for whoever gets the lucky start/letter draw, where would be the fun? Restricted territory in the middle of the board is what the players have to overcome.
> Sometimes I dropped junk in protected areas of the game just to wait for my opponent to be forced to touch my “front line”.
That sounds like a sound strategy. It forces you to spend a resource (protected space; potentially useful tiles) in order to take advantage of the defensive advantage, with the potential payoff that it can turn the tide of the game. It also helps build up a reservoir of usable swappable tiles... but using swaps well is also tricky, so it's not pure advantage.
Playing these waiting game phases effectively, for me, added to the sense of satisfaction in pulling off a win.
> I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles. Getting a rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to waste turns playing them out knowing they will weaken your board and get destroyed.
You're not wasting turns, you're getting rid of vowels in order to get to draw new letters. Finding ways to make the sacrifices without weakening your position requires smart play. Again, getting past these obstacles makes for a fun challenge.
I enjoy the gameplay, the mechanic of building up big words to eat through the opponents structure is really cool! I'm a big addict of wordle and quina as well. Word games in general still feel unexplored, I always expect them not to be fun and then get sucked in.
EDIT:.... hrm... so the tutorial always shows 'me' at the bottom'. Apparently, I'm at the top, and my 'dock' is at the top. That's a confusing way to start something. Relying on 'color' of tiles alone is just.. this was aggravating.
I also created a word-based strategy game (Crossword Island Hopper) with the concepts of capturing territory and battling your opponent. It has these differences: 1) Each turn is one word, and turns are played simultaneously by all players. 2) In a battle the newest word can either be destroyed or letters can be converted to your own. 3) Default mode is to win by points but there are also modes where you need to connect your words from point to point to win, like this game.
You can try it here: http://crosswordislandhopper.com/cih