Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Bracket City – A daily, exploded (?) crossword puzzle
Hi hn - I co-own a diner where I co-host a puzzle night that is kind of like a diner-themed escape room. At the last one, I made a puzzle that was crossword-like clues nested in brackets. People at the diner seemed to like it, so I resolved to make it a real game and Bracket City was born: https://bracket.city. I love crosswords, so it's been fun to write crossword-like clues: [it contains MSG] as well as clues that would not make it into a crossword: [___ hard place] I write all the puzzles and post a new one at midnight ET every day of the week. Still working on a lot of…
Bracket City is a daily word puzzle game featuring crossword-style clues enclosed in brackets that players solve by filling in answers. Created by a diner owner who hosts puzzle nights, the game offers clues ranging… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hi HN — Bracket City is the word puzzle game I made earlier this year and (in part thanks to this community, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622719) managed to license to the Atlantic in April. The game has been growing a lot and I wanted to share the latest: a tool that lets anyone make a Bracket City puzzle — specifically a “Bracket Suburb”! I made this tool to help me construct puzzles, and I’ve been using it every day for months. After the Atlantic launch, I started to get the occasional inquiry about whether there was a way to make your own puzzle. One guy…
Oct 2025 · builder.bracket.city · its alternatives →
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indoslot303 x the disney chef yang menjadi kolaborasi paling apik para member jadi lebih mudah login slot gacor paling aman disini buruan cobain sekarang.
2022 · killercrossword.com · its alternatives →
- 3AW
I’ve long thought that the Word of the Day was a wasted genre. The goal should be to give you words you can use; to enrich your understanding of words you already know; or at least to use words to tell you something neat about the world. Instead, what you usually get is words that will never be used in conversation, held up as curios. Some examples from Dictionary.com’s daily email: thewless, balladmonger, vagility, contextomy. These words are... not useful. I’ve always thought I could do better. My friend Ben recently created a daily puzzle game, called Bracket City, launched here on HN…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Word Slicer▲85I shared Word Slicer here a while back — it’s a free, ad-free, browser-based word game where you try to find 5 words in 5 minutes. Since then I’ve been improving it (daily challenge archive, cleaner UI, better stats), and I’d love more feedback from the HN crowd. In particular, I’m interested in thoughts on the gameplay flow, design/UX, and what would make it more engaging.
2024 · wordslicer.com · its alternatives →
- 5
A brand new crossword puzzle is published each night at 10pm
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Crosswordle▲77Like a tiny game of Scrabble, generated each day
2022 · cross-wordle.games · its alternatives →
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Hey there! I'm the brains behind the math crossword game on my site. This game is all about making math a little more fun – users just drag and drop numbers to fill in the blanks and move on to the next level if they get it right. Let me know if face any issues or have any suggestions! :)
2024 · scientific.place · its alternatives →
- 8IM
2024 · triword.net · its alternatives →
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Hi everybody. I occasionally make little browser-based games, and this is my latest attempt. It's not quite done, but it's quite playable (note: it does include audio): https://www.omiword.com/ This has been my occasional tinker target for ~5 years now, starting in the early days of Covid. The objective is to drag letter tiles within certain boundaries to spell four common American-English words. It hasn't got ads or anything, it's just supposed to be fun for its own sake. If people happen to like it, I might add an option for folks to make a small, one-time payment to unlock…
2025 · omiword.com · its alternatives →
- 10AN
2022 · twentyletters.com · its alternatives →
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Planet Crossword▲110Multiplayer crosswords for streaming and friends
2022 · hovercats.gg · its alternatives →
- 12NL
I've been playing Wordle and remembered this puzzle game I used to play with my grandfather. It's inspired by the block puzzles in many newspapers but made to be shorter: just guess the nine letter word. So I made a quick thing to play with my family like we used to. I thought you guys might enjoy it.
2022 · nineletterwordgame.com · its alternatives →
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Wordfall▲13I've been working on this for a while as an experiment and I'm now pretty happy with it. I've always written code, but I've always been a frankly incompetent frontend developer, and I've never really been able to talk myself into making a game; it was just too much trouble, even though I had ideas I wanted to try! Claude Code made it possible for the first time. I hope you like it. I'm still working on it!
2025 · playwordfall.com · its alternatives →
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- 15WH
As a fan of dense New York Times-style crosswords, I challenged myself to create topic-specific puzzles. It turns out that generating crosswords and efficiently placing words is a non-trivial computational problem. I started the project, "Joystick Jargon" combining traditional crossword elements with gaming-related vocabulary. Here's the technical process behind it: 1. Data Source: Used a 3.8 Million Rows Reddit dataset from Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/webis/tldr-17). 2. Data Filtering: Narrowed down to gaming-related subreddits (r/gaming,…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN! Looking for feedback on this 1v1 and daily word dueling game I've built over the last few months. Play here: https://wordtrak.com/ Or on iOS here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordtrak/id6760442363 (Android version soon!)
May 2026 · wordtrak.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Ever heard of the Tetris effect? It’s where you play so much Tetris that the game starts to seep into your thoughts, your dreams, your half-waking hallucinations, and pretty much every part of your reality that has nothing to do with Tetris. Well, I do a lot of crosswords—by “do” I mean both “solve”
2024 · aaronson.org · its alternatives →
- 18
Your new favorite word game: a new Daily and Mini every day. Drag lettered pieces into a frame and turn them until every row and column spells a word.
15d ago · wordminos.com · its alternatives →
- 19EI
Hi HN, I've been experimenting on-and-off over the years trying to automatically generate crosswords [1]. Recently I've been feeling like my results are good enough that I want to share them and see what other people think. I'm not trying to claim that these could appear in, say, the NYT in their current state, but honestly the velocity of progress makes me feel like I will inevitably be able to automatically generate NYT-quality crosswords within just a year or so. A write-up is here: https://abstractnonsense.com/crosswords.html And you can play the crosswords here:…
2024 · abstractnonsense.com · its alternatives →
- 20
A week ago I launched Tiled Words, my own unique spin on the daily word puzzle genre. Tiled Words merges tile-placing board game mechanics with crosswords. You rotate and rearrange tiles to find clues and rebuild a broken crossword. Every day there's a new themed puzzle for you to solve. The game is web based: the graphics are SVGs, animations are powered by CSS, and Vue/Nuxt are used to power templating, reactivity, and routing. Most of the complex logic lives in TypeScript modules. The whole thing is responsive. It's been a long time in the making. I started the first version in the…
Oct 2025 · tiledwords.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Forkle (forkle.co.uk) is a daily word game where two thematically linked crosswords occupy the same grid simultaneously. Every tile contains two letters - one belonging to each puzzle - displayed as a diagonal colour split. Where the two puzzles intersect, some tiles share the same letter, giving you a foothold into both crosswords at once. The mechanic has two layers: the shared grid, and the connected themes. Each day's two crosswords are thematically paired around a central idea. For example, a previous puzzle was "Same House, Different Kingdoms" - same home, same humans, entirely…
Apr 2026 · forkle.co.uk · its alternatives →
- 22
My partner and I built a daily word game that has elements of the Mini Crossword, Wordle, and Spelling Bee, with some twists all its own. I’ve been fairly obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle ever since I saw the documentary Wordplay about 12 years ago. I started with Mondays and gradually made my way up to Saturdays, and when I began to appreciate the puzzles as aesthetic objects worthy of appreciation and criticism (rather than just a slog to survive and then brag about), I began to wonder what it would be like to create puzzles. But making full crossword puzzles was always…
2025 · triplit.com · its alternatives →
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My friends and I love playing description games, but got tired of the same old cards - so I made a simple web app with a fresh set of prompts, and a different timer mechanic: Rather than teams taking turns, everyone sits together, and you describe only one prompt at a time. As soon as you're done you pass the phone to the player on your left, who gets a new set of prompts to choose from, and so on. After an exponential (memoryless) random amount of time, the round ends (loudly!), and whoever was holding the phone at the time loses a life for their team. It's like Hot Potato. The prompts are…
2025 · wilf.live · its alternatives →
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