I got "Negociate" after like 20 tries, the spelling of which I've never seen. I ended up using the hints to figure it out. When I clicked on the link of the word it took me to a "No results found for negociate!" page on Dictionary.com. Pretty frustrating, might want to double check your word list.
minaguib · 11h ago
Thanks - cleaned up the list a bit with the help of AI
salamanderman · 8h ago
Bisection search the game, but honestly was fun to play with my partner multiple times.
ynac · 5h ago
I got "forth" in five guesses, first game. Which makes me feel like I'm psychic! Which would be really cool, but is it just matching the first two letters of the word or something? I'm usually terrible at these until I understand how they work.
jmpavlec · 13h ago
A little presumptuous to say it is the world's "favorite" guessing game... But I had fun for a few words. It was nice you could press the enter key on mobile and keep the keyboard up.
Are you thinking of doing a daily word? Or just a random dictionary word each time you refresh?
minaguib · 12h ago
It's a random word each game (but the URL is shareable with a friend to play the same word).
TBH I've had it up as-is for a decade as a classical web app, but just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate most hosting costs.
glaucon · 11h ago
Out of interest what did you use (framework, or 'no framework') for the frontend-only ? Anything you feel like you've learnt from the process ?
minaguib · 11h ago
I've always been a backend/systems kind of guy.
For the frontend for this I used Vue.JS as a learning experience. Overall it was straightforward and quite pleasant.
The hardest part was the mental process of giving up on server-side business logic enforcement (such as anti-cheating). At the end of the day ... "it's just a game" :)
csnizik · 7h ago
Very clever idea! It's difficult to come up with an original idea for a word game, but you seem to have done it. If there's one like this, I haven't seen it.
The only issue I noticed was there seems to be some lag on printing some of the results. Maybe memoizing some repetitive functions might help, if you're not already.
Nice work!
radpanda · 13h ago
I think I prefer alphaguess.com’s simpler interface
minaguib · 12h ago
I like it as well - especially the logical top-input-bottom layout
cardamomo · 11h ago
Fun game! It stopped responding when I got close to guessing the secret word, though. Then I refreshed the page, and my progress was lost. With a little bit more polish, I think I can add this to my daily game rotation!
minaguib · 11h ago
Aah - not sure why it stopped responding, sorry about that.
I'll try to add some local state management so a refresh for a game doesn't lose progress.
glaucon · 11h ago
I typed 'mountain' (without the quotes), pressed "GO" and I got a tooltip saying "only letters a-z are allowed" . This is Firefox/Windows.
glaucon · 11h ago
I then went back to the home page and started again and 'mountain' was accepted.
glaucon · 11h ago
Otherwise, I'm enjoying it !
minaguib · 11h ago
Thanks - I've removed the pattern validation for now
uptown · 11h ago
Had the same problem with a different word. Chrome / Mac.
pardner · 12h ago
Nicely implemented screen layout. Curious if you've thought of reporting metrics showing how many guesses it's taking people? (I got 'volatile' in 9)
minaguib · 12h ago
I have a decade's worth of guess statistics per word.
Unfortunately, I just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate hosting costs, so I have no good location to keep tracking these stats.
Theoretically, "Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are around 171,476 words currently in use in the English language", the log2() of which is around 17.38 - I have no historical data for 'volatile'
SamBam · 11h ago
Hmmm, but the shortened dictionary being used is presumably less than that, so my best-so-far of 17 is probably below optimal...
aqme28 · 12h ago
Pretty cool!
Obviously the best strategy is binary search, but it's pretty hard to figure out the best choice for that on the fly.
spyrja · 5h ago
That's basically what I did. Drilled down in a binary-search fashion, guessing "captive" in 18 tries. (Doing it programmatically would have been even faster, of course, but then what is the fun of that? The manual approach yielded a fairly optimal performance anyway.)
_tqr3 · 12h ago
> binary search
Hence the word "Mid".
sarpdag · 12h ago
It was fun. I don't know if I would play again or not, but played 2 times without losing focus.
layer8 · 10h ago
I didn’t now that binary search is the world’s favorite guessing game. ;)
Are you thinking of doing a daily word? Or just a random dictionary word each time you refresh?
TBH I've had it up as-is for a decade as a classical web app, but just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate most hosting costs.
For the frontend for this I used Vue.JS as a learning experience. Overall it was straightforward and quite pleasant.
The hardest part was the mental process of giving up on server-side business logic enforcement (such as anti-cheating). At the end of the day ... "it's just a game" :)
The only issue I noticed was there seems to be some lag on printing some of the results. Maybe memoizing some repetitive functions might help, if you're not already.
Nice work!
I'll try to add some local state management so a refresh for a game doesn't lose progress.
Unfortunately, I just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate hosting costs, so I have no good location to keep tracking these stats.
Theoretically, "Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are around 171,476 words currently in use in the English language", the log2() of which is around 17.38 - I have no historical data for 'volatile'
Hence the word "Mid".