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Show HN: Wordit – Change One Letter, Keep the Chain Going (victorribeiro.com)

45 points by atum47 ↗ HN
Hi everyone,

I got this idea for a game where, starting from a four letter word you need to go as deep as you can in your vocabulary, changing only one letter per word.

bear -> beer -> peer...

Each correct word gives you 1 point

Each incorrect word takes one life away from you, you start with 3

22 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 43.3 ms ] thread
uberex
This sort of thing was a favourite in puzzle books except you had to get to the end word.

Fun play!

I soon realized get to a nice word where the first letter can be replaced alot like "buck".

tty456
Love the concept! Although found it a bit leading of easy answers once I landed on a word where changing the first letter yielded many new words (i.e. word like 'time' yielded many new *ime words, or plural words if ending in an s). Felt repetitive after a while. Perhaps a Hard mode where the next changed letter must be a different position?
quuxplusone
+1. It felt very mechanical running through "bard, card, hard, lard, nard, pard, sard, ward, ware, care, dare, fare, hare, mare, nare, pare, tare, bare, bark, dark, hark, lark, mark, nark, park, sark,..." Definitely feels like something a computer could do better than a human. (And the leaderboard confirms it.)

But switching the traversal order to "bard, bare, care, card, hard, hare, dare, dark, hark, hart, cart,..." doesn't seem to make it any more fun.

My suggestion would be to add an "enemy AI" following its own trajectory toward you; your job then is not just to walk around as long as possible, but to stay at least one step ahead of the enemy for a long as possible.

The enemy might not move just one step per turn; it might do something like "stand still for 3 turns, then change 2 letters in a single turn."

Showing the enemy's words to the player would also increase the "discoverability" of paths in the game. The player could say "Oh, apparently NARD is a valid word! I'll remember that for next time."

tim-projects
LARP wasn't in the dictionary. I feel cheated.
naikrovek
“bapt” was my starting word.

I was doomed to fail. “bapt” are you kidding?

nosioptar
The keyboard control on mobile is tedious. Have to tap in letter box to get keyboard, keyboard disappears after entering letter, have to repeat for each letter. It'd be a huge improvement to let me type all four letters without exiling my keyboard to mordor.
vova_hn2
I wish it would show the whole chain in the end, perhaps augmented with dictionary meanings or links to Wiktionary.
atum47
Can paxcodex write a few words on how he got a score of 6472? I'm recovering from surgery and it is hard for me to do anything now, even type.
nathan03
"liam" isn't in the dictionary?
hasudon7171
That's interesting.My native language is not English, so I can study English words throught this site
JeelVankhede
Wow! amazing concept! I couldn't score much for the very first time but I kept going again and again. Good way to find out how many words one can construct.

Some ideas if you are planning to enhance this: - Add some hard modes - Add timer based challenges - Play with friends etc.

Let me know if you need help in collaborating, I can help out on any coding tasks if you want to take this project to the next level. Peace! :)

atum47
my arm is a little better, so i've updated the leader board to show top 10 players and top 10 bots