Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves (twixt.games)
I added a few more transforms, anagrams, verb/tense changes, but the answers kept coming out too obvious. I couldn't distort the word enough to make it interesting. The breakthrough was compound pairs. Jumping from one word to another through their compound (sea → horse, via seahorse) really obscures the path and that's when it suddenly got fun and unpredictable.
I've been sharing it with friends. I'm in the UK so mostly UK testers, fair warning that a couple of the homophones may lean British.
They've been playing daily and seem hooked, so it felt worth posting here. It's one puzzle a day mainly so I actually have time to hand pick puzzles that have a satisfying path. Today's puzzle is on the easy side but they can get really tricky. The name is from 'betwixt', the whole game is about moving between two words. I did clock afterwards that there's a 60s board game with the same name, but they're pretty different things.
12 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadWill admit I got excited when I saw the name - I played (the other) Twixt with my Grandpa when I was a kid, it was super fun.
And yes, TwixT does look like a really novel game! I've never really seen a peg board style board game before. I'll try find an old copy on eBay and give it a go.
Do you have suitable opponents? If not, try playing on the internet:
https://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/games/gamedetail.jsp?gtid=tw...
(I'm very proud to have once won a championship there, also apparently I'm the highest rated player on the 48x48 board, yay!)
Will you / could you add access to past puzzles? That's the first thing I looked for but couldn't find.
-It's not clear to me whether the game is intended to accept any valid intermediate move or to only accept moves that lead to the correct solution. For a while, I though it only accepted correct moves, because it would not accept "steak->house" or "stake->holder" as valid moves, when I think those should clearly be valid "compound" actions (if I understand the rules correctly).
-On the other hand, I now realize that it wouldn't make sense to have an "undo" button if it were impossible to input valid but wrong moves. So maybe omitting steakhouse and stakeholder was an oversight? But now I've spend a while in a "dead end" when I thought the game was telling me I was on the right track.
-At this point, I've spend more time trying to figure this meta question about the rules than I have spent trying to solve the actual puzzle. It would help if the instructions or the game feedback made it clear whether "acceptance" = "correctness" or mere "validity".
-Also, I tried to start off with steak->stake as my homophone move, but it only accepts it as an anagram move. Obviously it's both, but there's no way for me to pick which one I want to use (and therefore free up the move I want to reserve for later).
A spoiler for the some-owner puzzle: "one" is a homophone of "won", apparently, but I can't see how they're pronounced the same. In the examples we have "thyme → time", but doesn't "thyme" have the "th" sound while "time" has the "t" sound?
Finally, "One new puzzle each day" - why do people do this? There's no way to play more than 1 puzzle, but by tomorrow I will have probably lost interest.
Your version is nice too!