Neat! I played a few days :) the only issue I had was that I found it quite easy to tap a previously selected letter, and that’d mess me up especially if it wasn’t the last letter so far in that word. I think it’d probably be better to add a backspace button in addition to the clear one, and not deselect letters by tapping them.
Today's challenge ("Sports Teams") was particularly easy because each one was plural. That made each one "unscramble a 4 letter word" instead of a 5. Might be a consideration for the future.
A coworker and my wife and I have recently been really enjoying https://bracket.city which is a crossword-clue inspired word game with daily puzzles. It does take a little while to figure out, I'd recommend starting off asking for hints fairly often to decrease frustration, but after a couple weeks my wife and I are on a streak of 3 days of scoring 100.
You've had better luck spreading it than I have it sounds like. Everyone I've mentioned it to has said "It's too hard" and I don't think has really even given it a shot.
My first wrong answer was an international spelling issue. It would be nice if it accepted then silently corrected based on equivalent international spellings, but I can also understand why it doesn't, sometimes it might be more crucial to the solution.
I'll quite often wind up solving this by a sort of parallel construction, as in rather than getting the hint I can work out what word is supposed to be there based on what's around it. Some of the clues can be really cryptic.
I thought this was way too hard. I didn't figure out a single word and even failed the tutorial. Seeing everyone loving it makes me feel really stupid.
I do think it is something that is a bit of a learned skill. I've done around 30 of them and the earlier ones I did rather poorly on, and even within the last 15 puzzles I had one where I scored 0. But the last 3 puzzles I've scored 100 on.
It's not for everyone I'm sure, especially if you are unfamiliar with common English phrases (like "bang for the buck").
I think it has some potential, but I found today’s puzzle just too easy. I never play for speed, but even if I was, playing on a iPhone, it missed a lot of touches that I only noticed when I was typing a few letters ahead. So I had to come back, erase what I typed and start over. It was annoying already, but if I was playing for speed, it would be a deal breaker.
Nice concept, but US-centric short/slang sports teams' names is a bit misjudged as the very first puzzle when introducing your new game to an international audience. I solved them because they're (mostly) words rather than them having meaning to me.
I wish there was a more internationally friendly version of NYT Games, they're so fun and I play them daily but a lot US cultural knowledge is required at times
I love cryptic crossword, but there's so many "inside rules" that make them hard to approach for newcomers. It doesn't help that there really aren't a lot of good easy cryptics.
The thing with chess, even if you don't know the rules, you can still play and (potentially) lose the game. If you don't know some random american trivia, you're stuck forever.
For those of you who are put off from trying the game by the category for today’s puzzle being sports, note there are other puzzles from prior days with more general topics.
Click the calendar icon at top of page for the archive.
These are short little words that are not uncommon even if you are not familiar with sportsball teams. If you struggled unscrambling these words, I'd suggest your vocab is just in dire need of expansion.
Fun! I look forward to seeing what future categories and words are. Do you have to manually curate them each day? How big is your backlog? Is there a way to automate it?
thanks a lot :) yes my friend and I are designing the categories and the words manually with a tiny bit of help from AI tools but you can't fully trust them as they try to sneak in 6 and 4 letter words
I have a Wordle-type clone I'm toying with and getting it to wrangle the correct letters is a harder problem than it seems. Hopefully you're able to streamline your design process so it's as painless as possible!
Same! However, I think the OP has done a good job. On mini games like this, I guess it doesn't bother me. I only get frustrated if I have invested time and they throw a timer in. Such a dated mechanic.
I like the calendar where you can go back to play other days. Enhancement request: would be nice for this to have an indicator of which days you have already played.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] thread#5 (0:46) #2 (0:04) #4 (0:09) #1 (0:21) #3 (0:06)
https://www.whatsit.today/
#5 (1:18) #3 (0:04) #4 (0:46) #1 (0:27) #2 (0:09)
https://www.whatsit.today/
i feel smug
SPOILERS AHEAD
Today's challenge ("Sports Teams") was particularly easy because each one was plural. That made each one "unscramble a 4 letter word" instead of a 5. Might be a consideration for the future.
I didn't spot this :-)
But pretty creative game. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve showed it to my friends, and it’s stuck. My brother shared it with all of his coworkers and they’re now playing too.
It’s fun watching it “spread” amongst my social group
My first wrong answer was an international spelling issue. It would be nice if it accepted then silently corrected based on equivalent international spellings, but I can also understand why it doesn't, sometimes it might be more crucial to the solution.
It's not for everyone I'm sure, especially if you are unfamiliar with common English phrases (like "bang for the buck").
#1 (0:05) #2 (0:04) #3 (0:05) #4 (0:04) #5 (0:05)
https://www.whatsit.today/
Cryptic Crosswords are almost impenetrable from the US as they're so deep in UK specific words, spellings, and trivia.
I've looked in the past and didn't have much luck.
the new yorker archives are a great place to start https://www.newyorker.com/tag/cryptic-crossword
That's the game! The 'inside rules' for a cryptic are what makes it cryptic. Without them you just have a word puzzle.
Really like the idea though.
Click the calendar icon at top of page for the archive.
UI is splendid.
As others have mentioned categories could probably have broader/non-US content but that's easy. The site/format itself is great.
I block all such tracking, so thanks for allowing me to play without that tracking.
I do realise that such blocking affects your stats so if you could devise a way to track without using an external service that would be great.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ladel
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ladel
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/spellcheck/english?q=la...
OED has it as an incorrect/unusual variant:
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=ladel
It's misspelled constantly on the internet, but "ladle" is the correct spelling.