Show HN: Tiled Words, a daily puzzle inspired by board games and crosswords (tiledwords.com)

Tiled Words merges tile-placing board game mechanics with crosswords. You rotate and rearrange tiles to find clues and rebuild a broken crossword. Every day there's a new themed puzzle for you to solve.

The game is web based: the graphics are SVGs, animations are powered by CSS, and Vue/Nuxt are used to power templating, reactivity, and routing. Most of the complex logic lives in TypeScript modules. The whole thing is responsive.

It's been a long time in the making. I started the first version in the Summer of 2024. The game was originally inspired by board games like Patchwork. I wanted to make a digital game where you placed tiles on a board. I explored layering a few different game mechanics on top of that but none of my prototypes felt fun to play, so I shelved the idea around September 2024. (At its most complex, I was developing a deck-building game about planting flowers to heal a broken land.)

This July while on a hike with my wife I had an idea: what if I put letters on the tiles and let you rotate and place them to build words. I whipped up a prototype and actually enjoyed playing it. Even better, my friends thought it was fun too. I was convinced to keep going when I shared it online and got a lot of positive feedback from strangers.

Since launch I've had several hundred people visit the site every day, and around ~350 people finish the daily puzzle every day. I've gotten a lot of sugI'm hoping to share this with a larger audience since people seem to enjoy it.

It's been a lot of fun to design and develop. I enjoy working with my wife to build new puzzles. (She's better at thinking of the clues than I am!) Please share it with your friends and check back tomorrow for a new puzzle!

(I hope it's okay that I'm sharing this again. Last time I tried, it didn't get much engagement but the people who did comment seemed interested.)