Show HN: Qwertle, yet another daily word game

https://qwertle.friedman.in

by b0r0phyll • 2 years ago

103 63 2 years ago

qwertle.friedman.in

A new Wordle-like game, where guesses are ranked by how close letters are on a QWERTY keyboard. Try it out and let me know what you think!

grundoon• 2 years ago

Your game just told me "Ponzi" isn't a word. I feel like Wordle wouldn't have done that, and anyway at least it has the courtesy to say "not in word list" which is very different from the outright lie that your game just told me.

jerpint• 2 years ago

I don’t think the game is trying to lie to you, rather the implementation hasn’t been polished yet, no need to be so harsh

Kiro• 2 years ago

Wordle doesn't accept "ponzi" either. It's also not a valid word in Scrabble.

binarymax• 2 years ago

Lots of word game dictionaries don’t contain proper nouns. Ponzi is an interesting example because it’s now used as the definitive for what it is, so words like that are hit or miss. Other examples that might or might not be in dictionaries are Kleenex, Xerox, etc.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

I can change the verbiage to say "not in word list", but FYI it's using the same word list as Wordle so Ponzi would not be accepted there either.

tapland• 2 years ago

Yes it would: https://wordledictionary.com/results?find=_____&has=i,n,o,p,...

Ponzi is a surname, and not included in Wordle.

Kluggy• 2 years ago

I would recommend that you have a gauge next to the play board with the colors and what they mean, ranked from close to far, so it's easy to understand. I actually took bright red to be closer to the answer then dim red/black, so I totally wiffed on the answer. Having that info on the play area would help prevent that mistake.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

That's why I added the examples with descriptions, but I can understand if they were unclear. I can add a gauge to the game board, thanks for the recommendation

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

Hey, I just released a new update that adds multiple color schemes to help with colorblindness! At some point I may add a color blind mode that does away with the need for colors altogether, but for now this should make things a bit better. Also, there is now a gauge next to the board so you can more easily see the range of colors (unfortunately, it doesn't yet work on Firefox). Check it out! I also skipped forward a day, so if you already played today you can play again with the next word to try it out.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

Please don’t use green and red like this, especially with multiple shades of red. It’s a nightmare for colorblind people.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I thought about colorblindness and figured it wouldn't matter since the important part is the brightness, not the hue. Is that not the case? But anyway that said I'm now kicking myself for not realizing that that doesn't help with differentiating the green for correct... any ideas on how to address this?

nomilk2• 2 years ago

Try to pick more intuitive colours if possible. My first guess had both dark and bright red, and I wasn't sure which were closer/farther (had to reopen the site in incognito to get and read the instructions again). A more intuitive gradient (perhaps between just two colours, e.g. white and red) would remove the need for instructions.

giaour• 2 years ago

Maybe use a different color altogether for correct letters, like blue or bright yellow?

Vinnl• 2 years ago

Tour browser's (or at least Firefox's) devtools have an accessibility tab that allow you to simulate colour blindness. You can use that to play around until you find colours that work.

(Fun game btw! I like how this completely changes the dynamics.)

pyrolistical• 2 years ago

Just don’t use color. Put a a distance subscript

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

nomilk2• 2 years ago

Cool idea (and great name). I use 'STEAL' as my first word in wordle. Wondering what a good starting word would be in this variant. First thought: something distributed equidistantly across the keyboard, second thought: aim for edges so you can rule out movement in some directions and reduce search complexity.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

I always start with FRUIT, no idea if it's optimal but it works pretty well. Also, unlike Wordle, there's no downside to guessing words with repeated letters, so something like FLUFF could probably work too

delecti• 2 years ago

This is a neat concept. I really like how it shows the letters you've guessed for each position in the word as you type. It lets you type in most of a word to see possibilities, then backtrack and try another start.

croddin• 2 years ago

I like it! It would be nice if you could tap on any of the letters you have already typed when you are entering a guess and be able to see the guesses for that letter and change that letter without having to delete the other letters as you are working on a guess, I also agree with some of the feedback on making the color scale clearer.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

Hey, I just released a new update that adds this functionality, as well as multiple color schemes to help with colorblindness! Check it out! I also skipped forward a day, so if you already played today you can play again with the next word to try it out.

anon848736282• 2 years ago

Perhaps it is intended that players figure it out for themselves, but it would help to be more clear about which distances correspond to which color. And apparently being adjacent on the next row is not "as close" as being adjacent on the same row. I had assumed that there would be an equal radius covering the same color.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

It's based on the measured distance between the centers of the keys, so since the keys are taller than they are wide, it's a shorter distance between horizontal keys than vertical. As for informing the user about what colors mean, that was what the examples were meant to indicate: Q is as far as possible, and U is as close as possible (horizontally adjacent). But as was suggested I'm going to try adding a gauge next to the game board so it's more clear

anon848736282• 2 years ago

Well the problem I had with the example is that it doesn't say what the actual answer was... at least not that I could find anywhere!

andy99• 2 years ago

One suggestion is I'd like to be able to move back and forth between guessing individual letters, like starting with the 4th for example rather than the first. Because it's easier to try some letters you know are close and then guess the further ones.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

jasongi• 2 years ago

For accessibility, consider representing closeness without colour or shade of colour, maybe through a little number or something?

I think there might be too much information given away by disclosing how far away the letter is though. A more difficult mode could be just having three states:

1. Amber: Closest guess(es) so far 2. Red: Wrong guess that is not the closest 3. Green: Correct guess

So you only get new information after the second guess, assuming you don’t hit a green on the first go, and you don’t immediately eliminate most of the keyboard as soon as you are within 2-3 (haven’t quite worked out when the shading starts) characters away.

gnicholas• 2 years ago

Pretty cool! As others mentioned, color blindness is an important consideration (affects 9% of men), so having an alternate way of expressing the heat map would be useful. But for folks without that issue (I dodged it, even though it runs in my family), I think the current implementation is intuitive and works well.

Up next, Dvorakle?

jtbarrett2• 2 years ago

Neat! Bug report: on my iPhone when I quickly double-tap the backspace button it zooms on that element, which is pretty distracting.

mlhpdx• 2 years ago

Almost unusably so, as I’m trying new letter rapidly.

chandi• 2 years ago

For the developer - adding the following to the viewport meta property stops the double-tap zoom on mobile (note: stops all zooming on mobile):

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0" />

ghusbands• 2 years ago

Please don't do this. Web-sites that restrict scaling are terrible for accessibility.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

Fixed!

jtbarrett2• 2 years ago

Hmm maybe not, this is still happening for me.

sokoloff• 2 years ago

Feedback in the interest of helping your game find traction:

The Share button is hidden below the scroll when I open the stats panel.

That's pretty key to aiding in sharing/viral catchiness.

Chrome on Sonoma Version 120.0.6099.234 (Official Build) (x86_64), 100% Zoom, nothing else non-standard that I can think of

https://imgur.com/a/dWD4mNt

Then, when I copy it, I get a blob of text, which has no URL to your game and if I google the name in it, I get to someone else's game: https://qwertle.com/ (meaning you should probably include a URL to your game in the copied results)

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

Fixed!

talldatethrow• 2 years ago

Idk why but I found this much more difficult and mentally taxing than wordle. I was basically all strong reds until getting one letter correct and then actually getting them all on the last chance. I was shocked.

Tldr; surprisingly hard.

denvermullets• 2 years ago

This was pretty cool and I got the hang of it by the 3rd guess. It helps having that ? to read the rules again.

Colors are tricky but still a fun game

TimedToasts• 2 years ago

QWERTLE #651 2/6 ⬛⬛⬛

I also found the colors confusing but once I reread the rules it apparently stuck.

Will play again, thank you!

IAmLiterallyAB• 2 years ago

I'm having trouble distinguishing the differences between the bright end of the gradient. Maybe it should use a different color space. This site explains it well: https://joshdata.github.io/color-scales/

"Unfortunately math in “RGB space” isn’s perceptually valid. Dividing the green component in half doesn’t make a color half as green. Adding 50 to all of components makes the color brighter by uneven amounts depending on which color you start with. That’s because the sensitivity of human color perception is uneven across the gamut of colors we can see, and the definition of RGB used by computer monitors doesn’t follow human perceptual sensitivity."

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

zafka• 2 years ago

Hi Sam, I noticed that your statistics popup has a glitch. I was going to send a screen shot, but could not find an email. Mine is in profile if you are shy of adding it to your HN profile. I have enjoyed playing your version. It makes the mind use a different heuristic than Wordle. Sort of fun to compare each day. Regards, Jim

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

Cool idea. I really do think you should do something about the colors though. I enjoyed the game.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

Fun! Didn't realize till I landed a few that the white meant solved.

mcyc3• 2 years ago

I also found the color scheme to be difficult to understand. A friend suggested interpolating between red and green depending on how close you are to the correct key. This is not too hard, since red is (255, 0, 0) and green is (0, 255, 0), so you can compute a distance (normalized to [0, 1]) and output (255 x d, 255 x (1-d), 0) to get the interpolated color.

It looks quite nice visually.

I wrote a small thread on it: https://twitter.com/good_in_theory/status/175079370720771734...

https://sigmoid.social/@mc/111821291510126156

mcyc3• 2 years ago

Interpolating with the game's specified final green value (34, 139, 34) "forest green" provides a nicer effect than true green (0, 255, 0).

https://twitter.com/good_in_theory/status/175088137157541934...

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

mcyc3• 2 years ago

Ah, the other color schemes look really good (especially I like the heatmap one). However, the default stoplight one is nearly impossible for me to disambiguate. For example, in [1], I can't tell which of mine are closer at all (I don't think I am colorblind, but maybe I'm just in for a surprise today).

Anyway, overall, a very fun variant. Thanks for sharing!

[1] https://shorturl.at/cBJQ1

chirau• 2 years ago

The colors I got are suggesting that S is further from Y than H.

How is this possible?

retsibsi2• 2 years ago

Interesting game! If I'm reading the code right, the distance between two letters is the straight-line distance between the centres of those two keys on the on-screen keyboard? It might be good to make that explicit; I think the phrase 'a few keys away from' in the instructions had me expecting something different, like how many up/down/left/right steps it would take to get from one key to the other.

retsibsi2• 2 years ago

I obviously could be wrong about this, but I wonder if one puzzle per day is too few to get people hooked on the game? I know it worked for Wordle, but that a) had novelty on its side, and b) was lucky. Right now I'd happily play a bunch more times -- and perhaps find it fun enough to make a point of coming back -- but having played just once, I think it's 50/50 whether I'll remember it tomorrow, and if I don't then I may never think of it again.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

Hey, not sure if you've forgotten about QWERTLE already, but I just released a new version with unlimited Practice mode!

yedpodtrzitko• 2 years ago

Seems bugged now. Reopening the website still shows the solution from yesterday and there's no way how to clean it other than clearing Local Storage. Also any new attempt is prefilled with the previous word instead of being empty.

lacrimacida• 2 years ago

Another good one and free is https://www.threemagicwords.app

beAbU• 2 years ago

is qwertle not free?

klohto• 2 years ago

* Block the zooming in on iPhone (quickly clicking backspace button is the biggest issue) * Different color scheme. The shades of red are hard to distinguish

oldandboring• 2 years ago

Cool game. As a red-green colorblind person I am unable to play it, unfortunately. I suggest you use red and greens on opposite ends of the color intensity spectrum.

b0r0phyll17• 2 years ago

xirdstl• 2 years ago

It doesn’t track streaks correctly. I have solved for the last 8 days. It shows 100% correct, but my current streak is 1 and longest streak 3

RelentlessOpt• 2 years ago

Thanks for building this! It's a neat variation of Wordle. I enjoyed figuring out what an ideal guess would be, and just wrote about it: https://relentlessoptimizer.com/gaming/2024/02/06/on-optimiz...

Show HN: Qwertle, yet another daily word game

Related Stories