Show HN: I'm making a detective game built on Wikipedia (detective.wiki)

This is really cool, recommend people click 'restart' so you can see all the different gamemodes.

Really fun, took me over 20 articles before I realized I can just type the letters on my keyboard instead of clicking them one by one with my mouse :^).

Cool game, but when I was doing the map game it gave me the same article about 5 times.

It's also not clear if there's a goal in each game. So far as I can tell it goes on forever.

Edit: both the lock and dial game modes put me into the same dial game mode; I'm going to guess it's a bug. They also seem to be for the same article.

Where in the wiki is Commons Atribution?

This is a very clever idea. I've toyed with the idea of making a multiple site mystery challenge in the past, a bit like a geo game with real world tagging and drop boxes.

Never got around to it, but this is clever.

This is very cool! I am mildly disappointed that it isn't called Wikipedia Brown. Despite this, great work

What a great design!

How did you design that awesome background!?

should be able to scroll between images on mac not drag

Hey sometimes the "first letter" in the letter game when it's typed on the tape is in upper case .. kind of a hint :)

Very cool - I would like to contact you about this. Do you mind emailing me? My email address is in my profile.

What a beautiful idea! Really nice job for the UI

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

A pure passion project!

Great design and work overall, excellent project, congrats!

I can't play the game because the whole screen flashes in rectangles

This is beautifully designed and engaging and potentially a fun way to learn things! Amazing work.

Some things you could add to make it stickier:

1. Have a natural end where you "win" - possibly I just didn't hit this, it's the kind of game I'd play in bed in the morning as long as the play time was similar to Wordle and the other NYT games.

2. Have facts show up when you get something right! Could literally just be the opening sentence from the article and a link to the article. This extra context stimulates curiosity - I'd love to be able to have "Space physics? That doesn't sound like a real thing..." and then have the hat guy pop up and go, "You cracked it chief. Space Physics is the study of high atmosphere plasmas."

EDIT: for comparison, have a look at Metazooa - https://metazooa.com/ - which did this very well.

Was able to get a lot of the guess-the-word one just based on it being an anagram. Might want to throw in a few decoy letters?

The answer and next buttons could be clearly separate from the other UI, and they could also be the same button.

After my first answer, I just got ”Something went wrong…”

What a wonderful game. Great animations and simple interactions. Could you share something about how you've built this @jasonsmiles?

I'm guessing it scrapes Wikipedia for a topic and then digests it, converting it into informational cards.

Incredible

Very nice, but I did end up seeing what rude words I could make.

Good bit of work. I certainly enjoyed ten minutes with it. Like other comments here, I'll say that a lot of the same things kept coming up. I got Athens and Iraq multiple times. It might be worth spending a little time to "curate" some sets of articles or even put together an LLM agent for doing so.

As the other commenters, I liked the concept. I did the map, and got quite a few repeated answers.

I then did the ransom one, but I did quite well until I got definitely bored around round 70. I think 100 rounds are too much, at least for the daily game.

congras!

Nice!

Thank you, OP.