Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves
twixt.gamesI made this game while working on a different project about teaching English spelling. I was reading about homophones and got struck by how much a homophone can transform the shape of a word, so I started experimenting with little games built on that.
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.
There are some fun ideas here, but also some rough edges. Using today's puzzle (steak->boring, which I have not solved yet) as an example:
-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).
Yeah I think these are all really fair criticisms and I agree with them all.
Regarding the steakhouse/stakeholder issue, I think that because these words lean American they got missed in the compound word generation stage. Will add them now. Can totally see how that created a lot of confusion for you when trying to solve yesterday’s puzzle.
And yeah I've been finding differentiating between correctness and validity a really hard design challenge because I don’t want to reveal to the player that they are on the solution path since the ambiguity/branching is often what makes it challenging. I think there needs to be a clearer signal that whilst your answer might be accepted, it's not necessarily the correct solution.
Steak/stake is both an anagram and a compound and I still haven’t solved how we handle these edge cases. I shouldn’t really have released this particular puzzle given it starts with this issue. I just didn’t even notice till it was too late!
Thanks for playing and for the super valuable feedback!
I'm not sure about the homophones.
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.
>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.
Yeah it's unfortunate because I'm British, "one" and "won" are said the same for us but I didn't notice that they would be different for Americans. I should exclude puzzles where these differences happen, I just didn't spot this one. I'll have to test each puzzle with my best american accent on going forward.
>In the examples we have "thyme → time", but doesn't "thyme" have the "th" sound while "time" has the "t" sound?
In the UK we pronounce this like "time". Is that not the case in the US?
>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.
I need time to find the right puzzles and as you can see it can be pretty tricky to find ones that don't have regional pronunciation deviations, are fun to solve and are easy enough for a broad majority. I could add archive playing but frankly I do like the idea of a daily puzzle, even if some others don't like that. I think for as many people who don't like it there are people who do.
> because I'm British, "one" and "won" are said the same for us
Are they pronounced like wan or like won?
> >In the examples we have "thyme → time", but doesn't "thyme" have the "th" sound while "time" has the "t" sound?
I've heard it pronounced with a "th" once or twice. Now I read that "time" with a "t" is more frequent but both are acceptable.
> I could add archive playing but frankly I do like the idea of a daily puzzle, even if some others don't like that. I think for as many people who don't like it there are people who do.
To me it's an unnatural limit. Imagine if we couldn't see past HN threads or something like that.
Tough, but fun. Took me a couple times through to fully grok. Well done!
Will 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.
Yeah it can be really tough. The tricky thing is finding a puzzle that a good majority of people (50-70%) can solve without hints. It's also super unpredictable to determine what people will find tricky. I thought today's puzzle was relatively straight forward, it's EYE -> TIRED. But now I'm realising that EYE has so many compound words which mean N blind alleys to explore before you land on the correct path.
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.
> 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!)
I actually just created a VERY similar game, but called it https://ladderfy.com
Your version is nice too!
Ah cool, I'll give it a go.
This is a pretty awesome little game, seems more rewarding than most something-le games I've seen. Will share with friends.
Will you / could you add access to past puzzles? That's the first thing I looked for but couldn't find.
That's great to hear!
>Will you / could you add access to past puzzles? That's the first thing I looked for but couldn't find.
Yeah I'm still torn about this. On the one hand, it's obviously a really easy feature to add and allows users who want to play more to do so. And I'm aware that a lot of people really don't like it when daily puzzle games don't let you play through the archive. On the other hand, I am quite romantic about the daily thing. I really loved the fact you could only play Wordle once a day, there was something special about it in an era of unlimited, endless content. I know it's no longer novel to limit players to just one puzzle a day, but something is compelling me to keep it that way.
The game’s difficult to understand so it’s too punitive to not offer even a single practice/example puzzle to use for learning. One puzzle a day is nice once you’ve got the hang of it, but it’s discouraging to “waste” today’s puzzle on learning the rules and not be able to try for real until tomorrow.
I love this! Great work, took me 13 mins to solve my first just now with no hints, that’s perfectly aligned with the time it takes to drink a coffee in bed ;)
Nice, I'm so glad you liked it!
i like it, got bored of wordle lately
Nice idea, I enjoyed this and shared it with a few friends.
Ah amazing, thank you.
its difficult initially but fun, will continue playing it. congrats!
Thank you for giving it a go!