1. For a version without the timer what would you like to happen if you are just completely stuck on a word? Hints to reveal letters or skip the word?

2. For those who like the timed version would you prefer to continue when you miss a word and then get a final score out of 18?

If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Relax Mode vs. Challenge Mode.

By the way: I really like the overall design of Zanagrams and 18 Words. These are small puzzle games with very simple, clean UIs. They work crisply and I've noticed you've been tidying up Zanagrams, adding minor features and settings. They have a very Classic Web feel to them. It's not like you're trying to get me to watch ads or subscribe to your newsletter or are just breadcrumbs to some for-profit thing. I like having a handful of very easy to pick up puzzles/toys when I need to fidget. They help keep me away from TikToks and Shorts.

I guessed "LATER", but it said - wrong and mentioned "ALERT". The only fix I would make is to ensure that all possible words with scrambled characters make sense.

LATER and ALERT are both correct, for text "A E R T L"

Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got:

|X|o|X|X|X|o|o|o|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|o|X| 13/18

I couldn't guess Dice because, as an ESL person, I couldn't make the D-i combo sound like /d/+ /aɪ/ in my head (it sounded as /d/ + /ɪ/), so a part of my neural circuitry didn't fire, and I couldn't complete it with `ce.`

In other words I, personally, in this pattern recognition game rely on the way words sounds in my head to find familiar combinations and continue the sequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

I think summarizing everybody's feedback the simplest solution is: "Game difficulty".

- Standard: what you have today

- Relaxed: 1 minute per word?

- Practice Mode: no timer whatsoever

And "Practice Mode" is a completely different mode that lets you skip questions, and instead of "you win / you lose" which is today's behavior, you end up with a score (14/18).

A shuffle button would be nice (especially if it's keyboard friendly). I've found it useful for me with the NYT Spelling Bee. Sometimes my brain just gets stuck on a letter combination because two letters are close together, and the rearrangement helps.

It would be kind of fun to have an endless mode too, that just pulls words from the dictionary. Maybe not quite in line with the "daily word game" premise, but something I would personally find enjoyable.

Possibly the biggest difference is that 23 Words continues with the next word if you fail to get a word within 30 seconds. When you have attempted all 23 words it will present you with results like this.

    You found 21/23 words
    
    Top 7% of players today.

I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.

Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?

https://www.uptoplay.net/wordiest-online-game/com.concretero...

Very similar in spirit, but IMHO a lot more enjoyable than your version. It's untimed which takes the pressure off, but still a challenge because there are multiple potentially correct answers.

The on-line version doesn't seem to be working, and I don't have an android device so I can't tell if the app is still working either. But I ran this on my nexus 7 for years until it died. It was one of my favorite on-line games. I would happily pay someone to port it to ios.

The only thing I really don't like, is that each puzzle can only be played once. I would like to figure out all words of a day even if it doesn't count.

This could even be an interesting statistic, how many people finished all words ignoring the time component.

It’s coming along nicely btw, some people are saying they don’t like the timer but I personally think the timer adds a lot to it. Also only being able to attempt once makes it more competitive, like if you combined hardcore minecraft and wordle. Hardcore wordle.

Forgive the shameless plug. Here is my word game which only features words from programming and compsci.

https://7coderwords.kenamick.com

For 4 letters it's enough time to guess, but I have no idea what they mean: 'Doby', 'Etas'

The UI is almost perfect, it’s seamless on mobile and desktop.

I made some criticism in other comments therefore I also wanted to make a comment saying what I liked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536488

Edit: I believe it was transferred to a new domain at https://wordnerd.co/

Love the pressure due to the timer, and the best aid to help is say it aloud.

Congrats! This looks like a daily one for me

I find that with things like this my distribution of times is extremely uneven: I get most words in a few seconds, but every now and then one comes along that for whatever reason my brain doesn't want to see and then it takes much longer. (And if that "much longer" is over the 30-second limit, too bad, I lose.)

And something about this makes playing with the timer annoying for me: I feel some combination of "surely I should get some credit for getting all those others so much quicker than the timer allows" and "oh, come on, that was just unlucky and doesn't reflect what I can generally do".

(I am not claiming that it's right to feel anything like that. Just that I do and I suspect I'm not alone.)

I wonder about a mechanic like this: the timer starts at 30 seconds; when you solve a word, rather than resetting to 30 seconds the timer increments by 10 seconds. So if you're solving in <10s on average then (at least after the first few, easier, words) you can afford to have the occasional brain failure without getting thrown out of the game. And your overall performance depends on how well you do on all the words, not how you do on the single worst one.

(I agree with others that there should also be a no-timer mode for those who just don't want to feel tested and/or stressed in that way.)

Good job, I got 15/18

way easier with fingers on the keyboard (vs selecting characters with mouse)

just typing out seemingly possible words per muscle memory / subconscious impulse

I got stuck on the word corner of all words. Ugh

I'm normally terrible at anagrams.

Enjoying time-based games must be some prey animal adaptation, y'all are probably vegan and have negative canthal tilt.