Show HN: 18 Words

The timer makes it not enjoyable for me. It seems necessary to the game design and I’m not being negatively critical. Just sharing an additional perspective. I’ve been playing Zanagrams and the ability to hide the clock really improved my enjoyment of that game.

If I could magically get a feature by request, it would be to give me infinite time even if that meant my score came with an asterisk. Maybe just call it Relax Mode vs. Challenge Mode.

By the way: I really like the overall design of Zanagrams and 18 Words. These are small puzzle games with very simple, clean UIs. They work crisply and I've noticed you've been tidying up Zanagrams, adding minor features and settings. They have a very Classic Web feel to them. It's not like you're trying to get me to watch ads or subscribe to your newsletter or are just breadcrumbs to some for-profit thing. I like having a handful of very easy to pick up puzzles/toys when I need to fidget. They help keep me away from TikToks and Shorts.

Would be nice to have a ‘scramble!’ button so it makes it slightly easier when we get stuck

This could be a cool captcha challenge (without the timer).

I like the idea, but I didn't like losing after a few words. Now it might just be me not being good at losing, but who is?

Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got

I can understand the clock running out meaning a loss - but I still want to play the rest of the words? how do I do that? I don't think they are accessible anymore

Great game, well done

When I didn't know the word I just mashed the given letters on the keyboard randomly, sometimes I got lucky with it

Fun game though I wish it left more time for the longer words, also wish we could have the letters in one line and shuffle them

Pretty frustrating when you find a word, but it's not THE word. Pretty fun otherwise.

I didn’t realize the word “crowd“ only had one vowel until I saw it scrambled!

Could I have the source code so I can plug in the Polish word list? It would make a great training app for Scrabble.

This was harder than I thought it would be. It's pretty fun to play! May I suggest displaying the final result and/or ongoing progress as 18 circles/shapes that fill up depending on how far you made it?

Nice, this is pretty fun!

Made it to 9 and then time ran out... I wish it showed me the word that I got stuck on! Argh!!!

Something about not being able to shuffle the tiles makes this hard for me.

Fun, that's it. New addiction after daily wordle unlocked

Pretty cool idea. I think a calendar based UI to go through the archives would be more user friendly than what you have right now.

iPhone bug: double tapping on a letter zooms in the viewport with no way to zoom back out, permanently breaking the page.

Embarrassed of where I failed (#8). Very cool game though!

Fun! But disappointing if you lose early. Maybe let the player continue after failing and showing a final score out of 18.

great game, what do you think of adding shuffle?

This is fun! Could use a short "how it works" blurb on the landing page though :)

Fun game!

I got stuck on the word corner of all words. Ugh

LAMER is a real word and COLOR is not.

Ha fun little game :)

Damn got to 13.

what made you go with 18?

I lost on the third word because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was, and then I restarted and got to the 18th. I'd look at the letters and just know which word it was, it was pretty odd how hard I found it the first time around versus how easy it was the second.

I'm normally terrible at anagrams.

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