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.serious question: if the majority aren't "in the know" and some minority is, and the game has literally nothing to do with sending any sekrut messages, who cares? like, is a white nationalist sitting here on HN, playing this game over a coffee and thinks, "heh, sick this is 4 numbers away from the callsign"
So it's about as esoteric as white nationalism is. For example, members of the current US administration know it/believe it.
(I’m not saying the game needs to change its name.)
I do have another version where it accepts ANY word but I found it quite unsatisfying when I survived by randomly spamming combinations and finding a really obscure word.
So am currently running it against a 20,000 word wordlist instead of my larger 300,000 wordlist
Granted, there are also people who get annoyed when the game seems too accepting of unusual words, but if you can point them to a valid dictionary definition for that oddball word, they usually accept it without argument.
Definitely not any less valid or unsatisfying than "zebra".
Given that those two don’t have the same letters, isn’t that the expected outcome?
EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.
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.
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.