Show HN: Whittle – A Shrinking Word Game
37 babel16 19 8/5/2025, 5:39:26 PM playwhittle.com ↗
Whittle is a small word game I've been working on. Each phrase must be whittled down by one letter (or space) each turn. The remaining phrase must still consist of valid words. That's it! There's a daily puzzle, as well as an archive of old puzzles.
The idea for the game came to me in a dream (really) and I built the puzzle generator with my partner, who's also a software engineer. It's a labor of love! Any feedback or suggestions are welcome. Thanks for playing!
I would love a dictionary lookup. I'd expect a big part of the strategy to be working backwards from the possible 1/2 letter words, but there's no way to tell how reasonable the dictionary is without testing, and getting the game into the proper state to test would be just as hard as solving the puzzle in the first place.
Having two separate goals (eliminate all letters, find all the words) seems confusing. Honestly I find the latter to be a fairly tedious prospect, but the game really seems to push you toward it especially with the colors on the calendar depending on the % of words found. "Damn it, I got a perfect score with no undos, and all I have to show for it is a red square showing how bad a job I did!"
The UI (on a desktop) felt kind of broken at the start because nothing has hover effects. Anything clickable would benefit from some kind of an effect, but especially the letters on the words. If you don't want color changes or animations, at least set the cursor style.
And I agree it would be nice if the game could detect when you've reached a dead end and notify you somehow.
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