Currently about 2,000 people play every day and I’ve released 59 puzzles!
One feature I’m excited about is crowdsourcing puzzles. Today’s puzzle is a “community puzzle” made entirely from clues that players submitted! I plan to do this every week or two.
I wrote about launching and the first month of puzzles if you want to learn more!
I started playing a couple weeks ago (and got my Mum and one of her friends playing too).
I enjoy it, but I find the clues seem a bit too easy, and honestly I'm normally terrible at crosswords. Take that for what you will, totally understandable if you're aiming at "cozy/relaxing".
I appreciate the polish of the UI compared to a lot of the other janky word games out there anyway.
And thanks for the feedback! Balancing the puzzles is really tricky so it’s good to know when folks think it’s too easy or too hard.
It’s interesting to see the range of player skill (and how much they do or don’t enjoy challenge.) On a recent puzzle one player left feedback that it was too easy and another left feedback that it was too hard.
My aim is for puzzles to be challenging but not frustrating. The hard part is frustrating means different things to different people. From my stats I can see some players complete a puzzle in 2 minutes that takes another player 20.
For the daily puzzle I do lean towards making it a little easier but I want to explore a few ideas for making trickier puzzles in the future.
- Releasing additional “bonus” puzzles this are harder or more complex
- Letting people build and share their own puzzles at whatever difficulty they choose
- Adding settings to allow players to toggle things like hiding the theme at first.
That said, I’m still trying to figure out the overall balance for the daily puzzles! It’s good to know you think they’re a little on the easy side. I should try to gather more feedback and maybe tweak that!
I've been playing by just looking at the title of the puzzle and ignoring the clues. I can solve most of the puzzles that way, and it increases the challenge.
I noticed it was added to a couple of others that I didn't submit to (goldles.com and dles.aukspot.com) I'm not sure if there are others I should be aware of.
I’m not totally sure! Marketing is not my strong suit.
I think my biggest advantages are:
- It’s sticky. A good percentage of players keep playing once they start
- Organic sharing. Lots of people have told me they shared it with friends and family. (I also built a “share” feature)
The pattern so far has been:
- I share it or someone else shares it somewhere.
- There’s a big spike of people trying it out.
- I get some new players.
- The player count stays roughly steady until it gets shared somewhere else that gains traction.
It was featured by Thinky Games. Sharing here got people interested. Someone shared it on Metafilter and that got a lot of views. Other folks have shared it on other sites that have led to smaller bumps.
My partner and I have been playing this almost every morning. We're really enjoying it!
Some feedback:
1) it would be great if the incomplete clues could move to the top. this would avoid having to scroll down towards the end of the puzzle.
2) better collission behavior; it would be nice if we could drag a chunk of words and it would just "move the other words" out of the way. Sometimes we have to spend time to make a path to move chunks of words around.
1) This is an interesting idea! I’ll play with that when I have time.
2) I am experimenting with this but have gotten mixed feedback from players. Some people don’t like it. I’m curious what you think! If I don’t do this I’ll explore other options: https://sunny.garden/@paulhebert/115698266272946749
Nah, that's too smart of a behavior. What exists now may have some edge cases, but it is otherwise staright-forward and intuitive. The only real "hassle" is swapping two large assembled pieces closer to the end of the game round, but it's not really a hassle. Not a big deal, really.
I’m thinking of adding a “shuffle” button to rearrange the tiles if you get really stuck. It’s theoretically possible to get in an unwinnable state where you can’t swap two tiles
My wife and I play nearly daily, it's become part of our routine. So much so that she's across the country visiting her family right now and we have done screen sharing calls to play Tiled Words. It's a really fun game, though the mechanics can sometimes be a little difficult (when I need to join two large halves of the puzzle but they need to be flipped).
Been playing daily since you last posted it on hn, great fun! For me Im a bit of an amatuer so the level is pretty nice, usually getting sub 5 mins or so.
A little feedback: clues which are cultural references can be pretty frustrating if you don't knw the reference. There have been some where even after piecing it together I've still got no idea how the answer matches the clue.
First time I see such a simple but attractive puzzle. I had to try to reproduce it using my Codorex tool, it's semi-functional needs a few more iterations:
Thanks for this game, I've been playing it since you last posted it and it's become a regular in my morning brain wake-up routine of Minute Cryptic, Shuffalo at The New Yorker and a couple others, so I like the bite-size nature of it a lot.
My sister and I are glued to it, and she continues to destroy me, with consistent zero reveals and half the time to complete, as yours truly. We love this game. thanks.
I love UI animations but they can be overkill for a lot of web UIs so it was fun to have a playground where I could lean into that more. (Though I still ended up pulling back from some of my more “out there” experiments haha)
I made a daily word puzzle called Tiled Words.
https://tiledwords.com
Currently about 2,000 people play every day and I’ve released 59 puzzles!
One feature I’m excited about is crowdsourcing puzzles. Today’s puzzle is a “community puzzle” made entirely from clues that players submitted! I plan to do this every week or two.
I wrote about launching and the first month of puzzles if you want to learn more!
https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/a-month-of-tiled-words...